CZM Rewind: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult & The Zizian Murder Spree (or Exactly How Harry Potter Fanfic Killed A Border Patrol Agent)

Summary

Podcast Summary: Behind the Bastards – How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult & The Zizian Murder Spree (or Exactly How Harry Potter Fanfic Killed A Border Patrol Agent)

Podcast: Behind the Bastards
Host: Robert Evans (with producer Sophie Lichterman and guest David Borie)
Episode: CZM Rewind: How The Zizians Went Full On Death Cult & The Zizian Murder Spree
Date: January 1, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the strange, tragic, and violent evolution of a fringe group spun out of the "rationalist" subculture—colloquially known as the Zizians. Host Robert Evans and guest David Borie walk listeners through the group’s bizarre ideology (with roots in Harry Potter fanfiction and "rationalist" philosophy), its descent into cult behavior, and the resulting real-world murder spree implicating several members. The central thread is how dangerously internet-poisoned ideology, the rationalist community’s cultural blind spots, and the shocking inability for outside intervention to defuse the situation led to deaths—including that of a Border Patrol agent.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Rationalism, Cult Dynamics, and Harry Potter Fanfiction

The Rationalist Community’s Flaws

• The episode begins with Evans admitting the research challenge: this is a group so fringe, so blog-driven, that sources are unedited, sprawling, and often contradictory—but all point to the same sick dynamic. (03:17)
• Rationalism and effective altruism attract extremely accomplished people but act as "a cult factory," regularly spinning off smaller, more extremist, or delusional subgroups. (36:41)
• "It's always a mistake to think of intelligence as an absolute characteristic." – Evans (14:12)
• Many women entering the rationalist orbit, inspired especially by Yudkowsky's "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality," face both misogyny and predatory behavior, which compounds existing issues. (38:23)

Harry Potter Fanfic as Origin Story

• The importance and bizarre centrality of Harry Potter fanfic in this community: "I cannot overemphasize how important this Harry Potter fan fiction is to all these murders." – Evans (38:31)
• The group’s leader (Ziz) and many others cite Yudkowsky’s fanfic as a primary philosophical text, influencing their ethics, mental frameworks, and obsession with moral calculus.

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2. Ziz’s Background, Transition, and Descent

Personal Crises and Community Rejection

• Ziz, struggling financially and emotionally post-move to the Bay Area, bounces from abusive housing to rationalist group houses, is rejected because of being a trans woman, and finds only unhealthy community in the fringe of rationalist subculture. (11:22)
• Ziz transitions during this period and starts a blog, Sincere Ously, initially modeled after Yudkowsky’s approach. The blog reveals growing obsession with "enforcement mechanisms"—both for self-improvement and controlling others. (14:47)

Enforcement Mechanisms

• Ziz is especially interested in tools like Beeminder, apps or systems where failing to meet a goal incurs consequences—she extends this logic to blackmail and, eventually, lethal enforcement in the group. (16:00)

Mania and Grandiosity

• Both Ziz and close collaborator Gwyn view themselves as world-savers, often riffing on science fiction or Greek philosophy terms (akrasia/the struggle against willpower), but then twist these into increasingly violent, authoritarian frameworks: "The stakes are immediately we have to save the world from the evil AI that will create hell to punish everybody who doesn't build it." – Evans (16:55)

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3. Deepening Cult Mentality

Living on Boats

• Unable to afford Bay Area rent, Ziz and Gwyn relocate to a sailboat, soon expanding to a “fleet” of decrepit boats. The isolation and physical deprivation worsen mental states and foster intensely codependent, cult-like dynamics. (19:13–36:52)
• "It’s just like, you have isolated each other away... and you're spending time brainwashing each other together in your little boat." – Evans (31:25)

Emergence of Doctrine

• Gwyn introduces and Ziz popularizes "unihemispheric sleep" (keeping half your brain awake and half asleep to supposedly unlock and separate personalities—an idea seemingly derived from Warhammer fiction, not neuroscience) as a method to "jailbreak" followers into sociopathy—deconstructing their morality for the sake of the cause.
• "We've been somewhat isolated from the rationalist community for a while and... developed a significant chunk of unique art of rationing and theories of psychology..." – Ziz, via email (52:01)
• Ziz frames herself as "double good" (both brain hemispheres are pure), while others are "single good" (one side is evil)—and thus need her corrective (potentially lethal) guidance. (55:26)

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4. Expanding the Group and Early Deaths

The Rationalist Fleet Becomes a Cult

• The fleet attracts a few more isolated, unstable, or highly suggestible rationalists. Sleep deprivation, peer "debugging," and cultic "mana" theory (persuasion power = inherent magical power) reinforce leader worship and a siege mentality. (60:55)
• The first suicide linked to the group comes via Maya Pasek (Squirrel in Hell), which Ziz chillingly terms "Pasek's Doom": "She comes up with a name for this. She calls this Pasek's Doom. That's what she names the infohazard that kills her friend who she's like fucking with their head." – Evans (71:24)

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5. Escalation to Violence

Incidents, Arrests, Radicalization

• Ziz and followers attempt a dramatic protest at a rationalist event, blocking the venue in masks and robes. False reports of a weapon lead to a SWAT takedown, traumatizing the group—and strengthening their paranoia and conviction that only violence can end their oppression. (90:37)
• Shifting to land (after their boats are impounded), the group squats on the property of a kindly but exasperated landlord, Curtis Lind. Rent disputes escalate as the Zizians refuse to pay, threatening violence and fortifying their compound. (98:02–110:13)

Doctrine Hardened: Killing as Praxis

• Ziz and inner circle begin explicitly discussing the need to murder "evil" parties to protect the group's cause and ideology, and justify such acts with blogged, heavily rationalist logic. "If you truly irreconcilably disagree with someone's creative choice... ultimately your only recourse is to kill them." – Ziz ally, cited in Wired (Spring 2021, ~110:32)
• The group experiences more suicides among members (e.g., Fluttershy); all are written about by Ziz as part of her martyr/hero narrative. (113:44)

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6. The Murder Spree and Aftermath

Lind, Borhanian, and The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

• Convinced that landlord Lind, and later other perceived enemies, are about to attack, the group ambushes Lind with knives and a samurai sword. Lind, despite being stabbed 50 times and impaled with the sword, shoots and kills Emma Borhanian in self-defense; others are wounded, and charges spin out from the attack. (122:01)
• Analysis of court records and evidence strongly suggests Ziz orchestrated the plot, encouraging followers to act as her hands. (127:55)
  • "On her blog when discussing theoretical acts of deadly violence, Ziz referred to what she called Quirrell's algorithm from the Harry Potter rationalist fanfic..."
• The group goes on the run; Ziz and one other member fake their deaths. (120:01)

More Deaths: Zazko's Parents, Vermont, and the Border

• Jamie Zazko (an offline contact) and Daniel Blank are suspected in the murder of Jamie's wealthy parents in Pennsylvania, likely to fund the cult’s operations, though no charges have yet been filed. (134:41)
• The group begins seeking a rural Vermont compound, acquiring firearms and cash (via inheritance or the murder). (141:50)
• Ophelia Bockholt, a highly qualified quant trader, abandons her career to join the fugitives as the sect searches for new safe haven. (141:50)
• Surveillance by Homeland Security and Border Patrol in Vermont culminates in a deadly shootout: Ziz disciple Teresa Youngblood and Bockholt are killed; Youngblood shoots a Border Patrol agent. (149:44–152:11)

Final Capture and Unresolved Questions

• After further clandestine movement, Ziz, Zazko, and Blank are finally arrested living in a box truck in Maryland. They’re found with weapons, ammunition, and all in "Sith"-like black garb. (152:58)
• Charges are pending or unclear in many of the deaths, including those of Zazko’s parents. The saga concludes with the cult’s ideology and logic so convoluted that even law enforcement and courts struggle to unravel the full scope of crime and responsibility.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Rationalist Community & Cult Dynamics

• "A cult factory for sure." – David Borie (36:41)
• "It's always a mistake to think of intelligence as an absolute characteristic. I am a genius software engineer, therefore I am smart. It's like no, no, no, you're dumb at plenty of things." – Robert Evans (14:12)
• "This is just like Scientology in the form of a codependent friend group." – Evans (107:46)

Descent Into Paranoia and Violence

• "You can really manipulate people into doing all kinds of crazy stuff if you can convince them this is how you can prevent the end of the world. Once you get into that frame, it really distorts your ability to care about anything else." – Quoted rationalist, Business Insider (35:15)
• "I get so many people lining up to commit suicide by zyzz" – Ziz, quoted from her blog (130:21)
• "On her blog, Ziz refers to what she calls Quirrell's algorithm from the Harry Potter rationalist fanfic... Intent to kill. Think purely of killing. Grasp at any means to do so. Censors off. Do not flinch. Kill again." – Evans quoting fanfic, (130:29)

Institutional Dysfunction & Aftermath

• "It is a crime [to fake your own death], but California shows no interest in sending police out to get her." – Evans (142:46)
• "After all their talk of murder, in practice, they're not very good at it, huh?" – Borie (152:11)
• "For all their talk of murder, the. In practice, they're not very good at it, huh?" – Borie, upon learning of the violent but ultimately failed nature of the shootout and attempted assassination (152:11)

On Healing and Escaping Internet Doom

• "If you want to immunize yourself to this, a great way is to just like, have friends who don't live in a boat with you." – Evans (78:06)
• "[I] need to go talk to my neighbor... pet a goat... Everybody, just—don't do any of this." – Robert Evans (154:55)

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Key Timestamps

• 03:17 — Host confesses to the difficulty and importance of researching such a blog-based, cultic case
• 06:08 — Prelude: How Harry Potter fanfiction is at the root of rationalism's spread (and this chain of violence)
• 09:14 — Ziz moves to the Bay Area, struggles with housing, and finds only alienation in the rationalist subculture
• 16:34 — Obsession with “enforcement mechanisms” and the philosophy of self-blackmail
• 19:13 — Ziz and Gwyn take to boat living ("the only way I could afford to live in the bay")
• 36:41 — Rationalism as "a cult factory for sure"
• 55:26 — Group dynamic: "double good," "single good," and Ziz's "hero contract" logic
• 71:24 — "Pasek's Doom": the first suicide attributed to Zizian ideology
• 90:37 — Zizians' dramatic protest at a rationalist gathering leads to violent police intervention
• 110:32 — Ziz's blog and the explicit advocacy for lethal violence to protect ideology
• 122:01–127:55 — The attack on landlord Curtis Lind and the resultant deaths
• 141:50 — Ophelia Bockholt, quant trader, drops everything to join the cult
• 149:44–152:11 — Escalating violence culminates in the killing of a Border Patrol agent in Vermont
• 152:58 — Final arrest: Ziz and co. found in box trucks, armed and dressed as "Sith"

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Episode Tone & Takeaways

• Evans and Borie maintain dark humor and incredulity, often resorting to pop culture metaphors to convey the absurdity and horror.
• The core warning is against insularity, online doom loops, and groupthink: the Zizians’ story is an extreme version of what happens when smart, alienated people radicalize each other unchecked by outside perspectives.
• The episode ends with a plea to make real-world connections and touch grass (or goats) as the strongest inoculation against internet-driven cults.

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Conclusion

This marathon episode detailed the bizarre, tragic rise and violent collapse of the Zizians—a rationalist offshoot whose mixture of sci-fi fanfic logic, sleep deprivation, and unhealed trauma built a "death cult" that left a trail of suicide, murder, and shattered lives. With roots in internet culture but real world bloodshed, it serves as a cautionary tale of unchecked online ideology, the dark side of "rationalist" thinking, and what happens when no one breaks the insular feedback loop. Despite the wildness, the hosts refocus the lesson: talk to people outside your bubble, touch grass, make friends—don’t end up on a boat with internet-poisoned cultists.

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For future reference: skip the boats, read less fanfic, pet a goat, and for god’s sake, don’t start a “vegan Sith” cult.

Transcript

[Robert Evans]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[David Borie]

I didn't really have an interest in being on air. I kind of was up there to just try and infiltrate the building.

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[Danny Shapiro]

Hi, I'm Radhi Devlukia and I am the host of a really Good Cry podcast.

[Robert Evans]

This week I am joined by Anna Runkle, also as the crappy Childhood Fairy, a creator, teacher and guide helping people heal from the lasting emotional wounds of unsafe or chaotic childhoods. That talking about trauma isn't always great for people. It's not always the best thing. About a third of people who were traumatized as kids feel worse when they talk about it, get very dysregulated. Listen to a really good cry on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to behind the Bastards, a podcast where I, Robert Evans, am going to war. Like a one man. Like Rambo. Like one of the later Rambo movies. Not the first one that was actually about the cost of PTSD and Imperial War, but like the later ones where he's a one man army. I'm doing that and I'm doing it against Microsoft because I fucking hate Copilot with me to talk about how much we hate Microsoft Copilot, my producer, Sophie Lichterman, and our wonderful guest, David Bourie. David, how do you feel about Microsoft copilot?

[David Borie]

Ah, Rambo 3, let's go.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, okay, okay.

[David Borie]

Kill a ton of brown people.

[Robert Evans]

Well, no, I mean, in this one, we're just. It's just like Microsoft copilots were killing.

[David Borie]

Okay. All of them.

[Robert Evans]

All of them. They're not really people.

[David Borie]

It's so bad.

[Robert Evans]

Outlook is terrible. Microsoft has really gone far off of making a lot of products that people hate to use.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Speaking of products people hate to use, David said before we started recording that he was excited to hear this story. I just want you to know where we're starting on this story is page 21 of the script. And where we end the script is page 49.

[David Borie]

Whoa.

[Robert Evans]

I made a mistake in doing this. I'm gonna admit that right now. Before we get further, I'm gonna say I erred in this. And it's, you know, I. I've made peace with the inevitability of fucking stuff up. Especially when, like, every week you're doing a different chunk of history and we're veering from, like, we're Talking about fucking 17th and 18th century France, and then, like, now we're talking about, like, a fucking guy who did a genocide in Darfur or whatever, right? Like, you're going to. These are all important topics, but, like, you simply can't every single week cover the breadth of stuff that we do and not, you know, you're gonna misspeak, you're gonna make errors and stuff. And when it comes to, like, I'm talking about Hitler, I'm talking about, like, not. Obviously those are important, but, you know, if I. If I fuck up some fact about, like, early 1900s Germany, I'm not gonna be, like, too bent out of shape. Cause it's like, you know, there's no perfection in this. But in this case, it's this tiny little community that nearly all of the reporting on has been, like, deeply incomplete. And I feel like, the stress over, like, what do I include in here? And the other problem is that none of these people have editors. And so everybody in this story has a blog. And every blog post is, like 40,000 words. So it's just like.

[David Borie]

Yeah, I was gonna say, what media are you able to get? You're getting this all straight from the source, right?

[Robert Evans]

A lot of it's. I mean, I've read most of Zyzz's blog entries, and I've at least done, like, little surveys of the blogs of everybody else in this. There were also a couple of very helpful compilations that like people. There's like one that like a former. Some. Sometimes it's like former members of the community. Sometimes it's folks who are like rationalists that were trying to warn other rationalists about Zizians. But like people in and around the community have put together compilations where they'll like clip mixes of news stories and like conversations online come.

[David Borie]

And obviously these folks like vlog mixtape is nasty work.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. And I'm deeply grateful. We'll have source links and everything in here. I note when I'm kind of like pulling something from something directly. But I'm very grateful to the maniacs who put together these documents that have helped me piece together what's happening. Cause really, if you're coming in as an outsider, if you weren't embedded in this community while all this crazy shit was going on, it's kind of impossible to get everything you need to get. You have to refer to these interior sources. It's just the only way to actually understand stuff.

[David Borie]

No. Yeah. I, as an outsider, I don't know what's going on. I don't know where it's going. I for sure don't know where it's going.

[Robert Evans]

It's going. We know where it ends. Which is.

[David Borie]

We know where it ends.

[Robert Evans]

A member of Congress shows up at the library in Vermont that the US and Canada shares because a Border Patrol agent was murdered there and like, threatens to take over Canada. And that's all. Like, there's a degree to which you can kind of tie heightened tensions between the US And Canada to the murder of this Border Patrol agent, which itself is directly tied to the fact that Alicia Yudkowski wrote a piece of Harry Potter fan fiction. I love that.

[David Borie]

It all goes back to that.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yes. It all comes back to bad Harry Potter fan fiction.

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We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave.

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We were in the car like a Rolling Stone came on and he said, there's a line in there about your mother.

[Robert Evans]

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[Robert Evans]

So part three, we spent last episode talking about Ziz's moving to the bay and their first interactions with the rationalist community. That big CFAR conference they went to that was very reminiscent. Had a lot of exercises. Reminiscent of, like, Synanon shit. Right, right, right.

[David Borie]

Very lot of talk of murder.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Lot of talk of murder. These people love theorizing about when it's okay to kill people. Constant factor in all of this, which.

[David Borie]

Can'T be a step in a good direction.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You know, you should be aware of if your community is talking about, like, the ethics of escalating to murder in random arguments. Too much. Maybe be a little worried if someone.

[David Borie]

Sits down next to you and says, how would you murder me? Or whatever this said, you always gotta get out of that room.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You wanna leave immediately.

[David Borie]

And furthermore, if they're like, yeah, that's the right way, even worse sign and.

[Robert Evans]

Then if they're like, yeah, would you perform necrophilia in order to, in the past, scare people away from attacking you? Like, get out of that room. Leave. Bad con. This is not a crew you wanna be a part of.

[David Borie]

Yeah, maybe just take a pickleball.

[Robert Evans]

Pickleball. People never talk about necrophilia playing pickleball.

[David Borie]

I don't think one time.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think one time. No. They all talk about how they're getting knee replacements. And that's the beauty of pickleball.

[David Borie]

Exactly.

[Robert Evans]

So in spite of how obviously bad this community is, Ziz desperately wants to be in the center of the rationalist subculture. And that means being in the Bay. Unfortunately, the Bay is a nearly impossible place to survive in if you don't have shitloads of money. And one of the only ways to make it in the Bay if you're not rich is to wind up in deeply abusive and illegal rental situations. You know this, David. I'm not. I'm not spreading any news to you. No.

[David Borie]

Shout out to my landlord, Mr. Lou.

[Robert Evans]

So Ziz winds up in a horrible sublet with a person she describes as an abusive alcoholic. I wasn't there. I don't know if she was the problem. And this per. Like, I. Obviously, I've got one side of this story. But her claim is that it ends in physical violence. Ziz claims he was to blame, but she also describes a situation where they're like, after a big argument, bump into each other and he calls the cops on her for assault. I wouldn't put it past Ziz to be leaving some parts out of this. But also, I know a bunch of people who wound up in horrible sublets with abusive alcoholics who assaulted them in the Bay Area and in la.

[David Borie]

Nobody. Craigslist is a crapshoot.

[Robert Evans]

You know, Craigslist is a crapshoot. Yeah.

[David Borie]

Every time.

[Robert Evans]

I always. I feel like the need to, like, qualify with, like, this is just Ziza's account. But also, this sounds like a lot of stories I know people have had.

[David Borie]

Yeah, no, it's tough to get by there.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So she calls the. Or he calls the cops on her and then, yeah, they do nothing and he attacks her in her bedroom that night. So she decides to, like, he's like, throwing a chair at her and shit. So she decides, I got to get out of this terrible fucking sublet. And unfortunately, her next best option, a very common thing in the rationalist community is to have whole houses rented out that you fill with rationalists who don't Have a lot of money. It never really like artists yet kind of like artists or like content producer houses. It never explodes. People never have horrible times in these. This particular rationalist house is called Liminal because you know, Gen Z loves talking about their liminal spaces on the Internet. One resident of the house reacts very negatively when Ziz identifies herself as a non transitioning trans woman and basically asks like when are you going to leave? So she has, you know, she, she says that as soon as she arrives one of the other residents is transphobes. She can't stay there very long. Again, all sounds like a very familiar Bay Area housing situation story. She bounces around some short term solutions, Airbnbs, moving constantly while trying to find work. She gets an interview with Google. But the hiring process there is slow. There's a lot of different stages to it and it doesn't offer immediate relief from her financial issues. Other potential offers fall through as she conflicts with the fundamental snake oiliness of this era of Silicon Valley development. Ziz blames it on the fact that she couldn't feign enthusiasm for companies she didn't believe in. Quote, I was inexperienced with convincing body language inclusive lies like this. I did not have the right false face, but very quick to think up words to say. So like I'm not good enough at lying that I'm excited about working for an app to help you do your laundry better. Which is like a third of the bay at this point.

[David Borie]

Yeah. And once again she has flashes of like, oh wow, you really have strong morals and all that. You know what I mean?

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Borie]

She a strong resume.

[Robert Evans]

Right?

[David Borie]

It wasn't.

[Robert Evans]

She does, she wants like an award as a NASA intern, right? Yeah, yeah. She really is good at a lot of this stuff. And all of these Zizians, as silly as their, their beliefs about philosophy and cognitive science are, they're all extremely accomplished in their fields. Nearly. It's good evidence of the fact that it's always a mistake to think of intelligence as an absolute characteristic. I am a genius software engineer, therefore I am smart. It's like no, no, no, you're dumb at plenty of things, Mr. Software Engineer.

[David Borie]

Yeah, don't sell yourself short.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So she does start to transition during this period. Goes on finasteride, which is helps to avoid male pattern baldness. And she starts experimenting with estrogen and antiandrogens. She wanted to avoid this for. I'm sure she had a variety of reasons, but as soon as she starts taking hormones, they have such a positive effect. She describes it as a hard to describe felt sense of cognitive benefits, and she decides to say, stay on them. By October, she'd committed to start writing a blog about her own feelings and theories on rationalism. And her model here was Yudkowski. She names this blog Sincere Ously, and it was her attempt to convince other rationalists to adopt her beliefs about, like, veganism and such. Her first articles are like, pretty bland. It's these scattered concepts and thought experiments. Very basic stuff like, can God create a rock so big God couldn't move it? And then like throwing a rationalist spin on that. So it's, you know, a lot of this is like, oh, maybe in an area in which College didn't cost 200 grand. You could have just gotten a philosophy degree and that would have made you happy. Like you just wanted to spend a couple of years talking through silly ideas based on dead Greek guys.

[David Borie]

Well, you know, the bay is the place to do that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, well, unfortunately. So she starts to really show an interest early on though. And this is where things get unsettling in enforcement mechanisms, which are methods by which individuals can like, blackmail themselves into accomplishing difficult tasks for personal betterment. She writes about an app called Beeminder which lets you set goals and punish yourself with a financial penalty if you don't make regular progr. And she's really obsessed with just the concept of using enforcement mechanisms to make people better writing. Often you have to break things to make them better. So not a great path we're going down here.

[David Borie]

Is she following this herself?

[Robert Evans]

She's working on. She's trying to use some of these tactics on herself to make herself to deal with what she sees as her flaws that are stopping her from saving the cosmos. Great stuff. A lot of good pressure to put on yourself.

[David Borie]

Yeah, this poor woman has been under the highest stakes this whole time.

[Robert Evans]

Well, and that's again, that's not ziz. That's the entire rationalist subculture. The stakes are immediately we have to save the world from the evil AI that will create hell to punish everybody who doesn't build it. And that. Actually, we'll talk about this later. That breaks a ton of people in this. She is not the only one kind of fracturing her psyche in this community. So right around this time, as she's bouncing around short term rentals and desperately trying to get work, she meets a person named Jasper Gwynn, who at that point identified as a trans woman, who now goes by Gwyn Danielson and uses they them pronouns. That's how I'm going to refer to them. But for clarity's sake, I'm going to call them Gwyn or Danielson, even though they went by a different name at this time, because that's what they're called now. Gwyn was a fan of Ziz's blog and had some complex rationalist theories of her own. They came to believe that each person had multiple personalities stored inside their brain. A sort of like, mutation of the left brain, right brain hypothesis. And each of these sides of your brain was like a whole intact person. Right. Like, great, okay, yeah, cool. No, you guys are gonna be fucking with your heads real hard. Great.

[David Borie]

Oh, man, these poor people.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So Ziz falls in love with Gwyn's ideas and she starts bringing them up in rationalist events, trying to brute force them into going mainstream among the community. But people are like, this is a little weird even for us. And she does not succeed in this. And as a result, she and Danielson and a couple of other friends start, like, talking and theorizing together separately from the bulk of the community. So now, again, you've had this. They're starting to calve off from the broader subculture and they're starting to, like, really, like, dig ruts for themselves in a specific direction that's leading away from the rest of the rationalists, literally.

[David Borie]

All that cult stuff, huh?

[Robert Evans]

All that cult stuff.

[David Borie]

All that cult stuff.

[Robert Evans]

Now, Gwyn and Ziz largely, like, bonded over their struggle paying Bay Area rents, and together they still upon a solution beloved by generations of punks and artists in Northern California. Taking to the sea, specifically. It's great. It's great. I mean, I've known like three separate people who lived on boats in the Oakland harbor because it was like, this is the only way I could afford to live in the bay.

[David Borie]

My little brother went to school right outside of San Francisco, and his principal lived on a boat right. Just like a mile away from the school. And everybody loved it.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, everybody loved it. I mean, I gotta say, everyone I know who lived on a boat lived on a shitty boat. But I'm also not convinced there are boats that any boats that stay nice for very long.

[Danny Shapiro]

Yeah.

[David Borie]

It feels like it would be dank, I guess is the word.

[Robert Evans]

Dank is a good description of boat life, I think, in general. Yeah.

[Danny Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

So Gwyn's boat was anchored off the Encinal basin, and Ziz found this a pretty sweet solution. She goes over to stay over one night, and while they're like, hanging out, staying up, probably taking drugs, they don't like, usually write about it, but from other community conversations, I think we have to assume an awful lot of the time when these people are staying up all night and talking. There's a lot of ketamine and stuff being used too. That isn't written into the narrative.

[David Borie]

That also goes along with the Bay Area.

[Robert Evans]

That also goes along with the Bay Area.

[David Borie]

Pills and powders are bigger.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Quote, they talked about how when they were a child, their friend who was a cat had died and they had to use their own retroactive paraphrasing, sworn an oath of vengeance against death. These are just people doing great, very healthy. It's like the opposite of what you want a kid to learn when their pet dies. It's like, yeah, you know, death is inevitable. It happens to everything. It'll happen to you one day. And it's sad, but just something we have to accept. No, no, no. War against death.

[David Borie]

No. They were like, no, no, no. I can fix this, okay?

[Robert Evans]

I as a parent, have failed in this situation. This was an unsuccessful step in my child's development.

[David Borie]

Maybe no more pets for a while.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe no more pets. Gwyn also spent way too much time online, which is how they wound up reading hundreds of theoretical articles about how AGI, Artificial General Intelligence Intelligence, would destroy the world. And again, AGI is like a mainstream term now because fucking ChatGPT came out a couple of years ago and everyone started talking about it at this point, 20, 16, 17. It's only like real people who are really into the industry in a nerdy way who are using that frame, like regular people on the street. Don't know what you fucking mean when you're talking about this stuff, but this is a term that is in use among them. And like, Ziz Gwyn moved to the Bay Area to get involved in fixing the problem. They were an otherkin. Are you familiar with this online community?

[Danny Shapiro]

Which one?

[Robert Evans]

Otherkin?

[David Borie]

Otherkin? No, I have. No, I've never heard of that.

[Robert Evans]

It's like a. It's like the Mormonism of furrydom, almost like.

[David Borie]

That's insane what you said.

[Robert Evans]

I don't wanna be like, it's harmless, right? These are people who. There's a mix of beliefs. Some of them literally believe they're fantasy creatures. Some of them just want to be.

[Sophie Lichterman]

They half identify as a non human creature, right?

[David Borie]

Oh, like their furry Persona is their true.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, kinda. That's close enough for government work. In Gwyn's case, it's even different. Where I don't think they believe they are literally a dragon, but they believe that when there's a singularity and the robot God creates heaven. They'll be given the body of a dragon because the robot God will be able to do that if it's a good singularity, at least. That's why this is all so important to them. Making sure it's like a nice AI so they'll be able to get their animal friends back and get their dragon body.

[David Borie]

Tale as old as time, you know.

[Robert Evans]

Tale as old as time. Again, a lot of this could be avoided by just like processing death and stuff like that a little better. But we don't do that very well in our society anyway. We've got a lot of people who are committed to denying that. So I'm not surprised. Shit like this happens at like the corners, right? Like this is. This is just a little downstream from that Brian Johnson guy tracking his erections at night and trying to get the penis of a 19 year old.

[David Borie]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

Like there's not like a massive sanity gap between these two things, really.

[David Borie]

No, no, it's. It's. I think, I think it's. I think we're drinking from the same well.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. So this is a result or. So Zy commits herself to turning Gwyn to the dark side, which is a term she started to use. Obviously it's a Star wars term and it comes out as a result of her obsession with what's called Akrasia. Akrasia is an actual Greek term for a lack of willpower that leads someone to act in ways that take them further from their goals in life. It's an actual, like, I think Ekrasia often was like an early term for like what we call adhd. Right. Like people who have difficulty, like, focusing on tasks that they need to complete. One of the promises of rationalism was to arm a person with tools to escape this state of being and act more powerfully and effectively in the world. Ziz adds to this some ideas cribbed from Star Wars. She decides that the quote unquote way of the Jedi, which is like accepting moral restraints, restrictions about not murdering people and the like, is a prison for someone who's truly great and has the opportunity to accomplish important goals. Right. If you're that kind of person, you can't afford to be limited by moral beliefs. So in order to achieve the kind of vegan singularity that she thinks is critical to save the cosmos, she and her fellow rationalists need to free themselves from the restrictions of the Jedi and become vegan sin. That's. That's more or less where things are going here. So it's here. I should note that while Gwynnenses are spinning out on their own everything that you're seeing from them, these feelings of grandiosity and cosmic significance, but also paranoid obsession are the norm in rationalist and effective altruist circles. There's a great article in Bloomberg News by Ellen Hewitt. It discusses how many in the EA set would suffer paralyzing panic attacks over things like spending money on a nice dinner or buying ice cream. Obsessing over how many people they'd killed by not better optimizing their expenses. End quote. In extreme pockets of the rationality community, AI researchers believed their apocalypse related stress was contributing to psychotic breaks. Miri employee and that's one of these organizations created by the people around Yudkowski. Jessica Taylor had a job that sometimes involved imagining extreme AI torture scenarios. As she described it in a post on Less Wrong, the worst possible suffering an AI might be able to inflict on people at work. She says she and a small team of researchers Researchers believed we might make God, but we might mess up and destroy everything. In 2017, she was hospitalized for three weeks with delusions that she was intrinsically evil and had destroyed significant parts of the world with my demonic powers, she wrote in her post. Although she acknowledged taking psychedelics for therapeutic reasons, she also attributed the delusions to her job's blurring of nightmare scenarios in real life, in an ordinary patient having fantasies about being the devil is considered megalomania, she wrote here. The idea naturally followed from my day to day social environment and was central to my psychotic breakdown.

[David Borie]

Oh man.

[Robert Evans]

Just taking ketamine and convincing yourself you're the devil. Normal rationalist stuff. Yeah.

[David Borie]

And I mean, hey, we've all been there, right?

[Robert Evans]

We've all been there. No. In fact, I don't think we've ever.

[David Borie]

No. This is the least relatable group of people I've ever heard of.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, exactly. Cause it's this like grandiosity. It's this absolute need to whatever else is going on, even if you're like the bad guy, feel like what you're doing is like of central cosmic significance. It's this fundamental fear that all is integral to all of these tech guys. It's at the core of Elon Musk too, that like one of these days you're not going to exist and very few of the things that you valued in your life are going to exist and there's still going to be a world because that's life.

[David Borie]

That's just. Yeah. That it's so crazy how it boils down to just like. Yeah, man, I don't know what you thought was gonna happen.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, bro, sorry.

[David Borie]

Yeah, that's just how it goes.

[Robert Evans]

You know, we've got like 10,000 years of philosophy and thinking and writing on the subject of dealing with this. But you didn't take any humanities in your STEM classes, so you don't know any of that. You're just trying to bootstrap it. Yeah.

[David Borie]

You just watched Star wars again and decided you got it figured out.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. You watched Star Wars 137 times and figured that was going to replace reading a little bit of fucking Plato or I don't know, man, maybe it didn't work. Also, again, the ketamine's not helping.

[David Borie]

No, no, no, no. God, to be a fly on that wall.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, God. Yeah. The rationalist therapists are raking it in.

[David Borie]

Oh, man. Honestly, well deserved.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. Talk about infohazards. Jesus.

[David Borie]

Oh, man.

[Robert Evans]

So I have to emphasize here again that I wanna keep going back to the broader rationalist community because I felt like a risk of this is that I would just be talking about one lady and her friends were. And it's like, no, no, no. Everything they're doing, even the stuff that is a split off and different and like more extreme than mainstream rationalism, is directly related to shit going on in the mainstream rationalist community, which is deeply tied into Big Tech, which is deeply tied into like the Peter Thiel circle. A lot of these folks are close to, in and around the government right now. Right. So like that is. It's. Ziz is not nearly as much of an outlier as a lot of rationalists want people to think.

[Danny Shapiro]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Anyway, at rationalist meetups, Ziz began pushing this whole vegan sith thing hard and again meets with little success. But she and Gwyn gradually start to expand the circle of people around them. Meanwhile, in her professional life, that Google interview process moves forward. Ziz says that she passed every stage of the process, but that it keeps getting dragged out, forcing her to ask her parents for more help in November, around the time her blog started to get a following. She says Google said she'd passed the committee and would be hired once she got picked for a team. Now I don't know what happens after this. She says Google asked for proof of address, which she doesn't have. She's just turned 26 and she's not on her parents health insurance either. She's been pages describing what is a very familiar nightmare scenario to me of like trying to get proof of address. So you can get a job and like continue getting like, you know, get on Calimed and stuff. And I do think it's probably the one of worth acknowledging that like as her brain is starting to break and she's having. She's getting further and further into all these delusional ideas. She's also struggling with being off of her parents health insurance and like trying to find stable housing in the bay. And like that influences the situation.

[David Borie]

And still in the process of transitioning, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes, exactly. And still in the process of transitioning, yes.

[David Borie]

It's a heavy workload.

[Robert Evans]

You're doing too much to your brain right now, so. And then she makes the worst possible decision, which is to live with her friend Gwyn in her tiny sail or in their tiny sailboat which is now anchored by the Berkeley Marina. Again, this is not like a houseboat. This is like a sailboat with one small room.

[Danny Shapiro]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Like a basket.

[David Borie]

It's got a cor. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

What is there?

[David Borie]

There's like a bed, a table and a sink.

[Robert Evans]

Right. Like a little bathroom probably. Maybe a kitchenette. But it's not like livable for two people. You should.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Anybody who's like ever lived in too small of a pavement space with a roommate knows that just like no matter where you're at, it's horrible, it's a bad idea.

[Robert Evans]

Imagine if that shitty tiny apartment that you remember from your past was a boat. Just. Just disastrous. And this is not a good situation. Ziz would later write. I couldn't use my computer as well. I couldn't set up my three monitors. There was no room, couldn't have a programming flow state for nine hours. I had trouble sleeping. The slightest noise in my mind kept alerting me to the possibility that someone like my roommate from several months ago was going to attack me in my sleep. So this is not a healthy situation. And both Guinenses have endured some specific traumas and both are also prone to flights of grandiosity and delusion. And now they are trapped all day, every day together in a single room where their various neuroses are clashing with each other and their only relief is talking for hours about how to save the world.

[David Borie]

Oh my God. This is a. It's a real villain story. It couldn't get any worse than that.

[Robert Evans]

It couldn't. And it's like at this point I don't think either of them is like intentionally doing anything bad. You've kind of created a cult where like you're trading off on being the cult leader and cult member for Each other. Like you've isolated each other away from the world and you're spending time brainwashing each other together in your little boat.

[David Borie]

Yeah. How often do you think they were leaving that boat?

[Robert Evans]

Not nearly long enough. And Gwyn is on what Ziz describes as a cocktail of stimulants, mapped out the cognitive effects of each hour they were on them. They get very angry if Ziz interrupts their thoughts at the wrong time. And also, like, Ziz isn't really sleeping, so they're just talking for hours and getting on each other's nerves at the same time. But also, like, like building these increasingly elaborate fantasies about how they're going to save the cosmos. And it's, you know, it's not great. Through these conversations, they do develop Gwyn's multiple personalities theory, mixing in some of Ziz's own beliefs about good and evil. And I want to quote another passage from that Wired article that summarizes what they come to believe about this. A person's core consisted of two hemispheres, each one intrinsically good or non good. In extremely rare cases, they could be double good, a condition that it so happened Lesotho identified in herself. And Ziz is consistently going to identify herself as intrinsically good. So she's. Both sides of her personality are only good. But most people are, at best single good, which means part of them is non good or basically evil. And they're at war with this other half of their brain. That's a whole person that's evil. Which is why other people can't be trusted to make decisions. You know, like, increasingly, Ziz's attitude is going to be like, like, only intrinsically good people can be trusted to make good decisions.

[David Borie]

Only the double goods.

[Robert Evans]

Only the double goods. That's such like a, you know, you're making your own, like, Orwell speech. Ziz, this is a bad sign. So zyz's Google ambitions fall apart. At this time, they don't really give us a good explanation as to why. I kind of think they started bombarding their contact with Google with, like, requests about why the process wasn't going faster. And maybe Google was like, ah, maybe we don't need this person. Zyz concludes failing at Google was good because she'd gotten $10,000 from unemployment at this point. Quote, this means I had some time. If they hired me soon, it would deprive me of at least several months of freedom. In which, of course, she is continuing to work out her theories with Gwyn on the sailboat.

[David Borie]

Also, I don't Know, if that's freedom.

[Robert Evans]

It'S really not freedom.

[David Borie]

Maybe work. I hear the Google campus has a.

[Robert Evans]

Lot of things to do, and it's kind of the what if. I think maybe at this point, she still could have pulled out of this tailsp if she'd gotten a job and worked around other people and socialized, not on the sailboat. But also a real consistent thing with Ziz is at this point, she has no willingness to do the kind of compromise. And I'm not just talking about the moral compromise, but if you're gonna work a job for a company, you're gonna spend a large part of your day doing a thing that you wouldn't be doing otherwise, right? Because that's what a job generally is.

[David Borie]

That's just work.

[Robert Evans]

That's just work. And Ziz feels like she can't handle the idea of doing anything but reading fan fiction and theorizing about how to give herself superpowers. Right? That's the most important thing in the world because the stakes are so high. So she, like, ethically can't square herself with doing anything. She needs to succeed in this industry where she has the skill to succeed. And this is another trait she's got in common with the rest of the rationalist EA subculture. That Bloomberg article interviewed a guy named Quaoqiu Yuan, a former rationalist and PhD candidate who dropped out of his PhD program in order to work in AI risk. He stopped saving for retirement and cut off his friends so he could donate all of his money to EA causes and because his friends were distracting him from saving the world. And this is all cult stuff, right? Cults want you to cut off from your friends. They want you to give them all your money. He's doing, but he's doing it, like, independently. Like, he's not. There's not, like, a single leader. He's not, like, living on a compound with them. It's just once you kind of take these beliefs seriously, the things that you. That you will do to yourself are the things people in cults have done to them. Right. In an interview with Business Insider, Yuan said, you can really manipulate people into doing all kinds of crazy stuff. If you can convince them this is how you can prevent the end of the world. Once you get into that frame, it really distorts your ability to care about anything else. Man. That's. Yeah, that's kind of the thing. It's harder to talk about this than, like, could people talk about Ziz as, like, oh, it's a cult leader, and she had her, you know, vegan, trans AI death cult or something. And you know, I, I, I feel like that's not close enough to the truth to get what's like to get how this happened. Right. Because what happens with Ziz is very cultish. But, but ZIZ is one of a number of different people who have calved off of the rationalism community and had disastrous impacts. But it happens constantly with these people because, like it's called such an engine for it, right? It's an engine for making cults.

[David Borie]

This is a cult factory for sure.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they created a cult factory. Oh no.

[David Borie]

Cults, they give you the base ideas and then you can just kind of franchise it how you'd like.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And a lot of prominent rationalists who news is at the time have since gone out of their way to describe her as like, you know, someone on the fringes. Anna Salomon of SEFAR described her as a young person who was hanging around and who I suspect wanted to be important. And Anna claims, is there anyone here.

[David Borie]

Who doesn't want that within this group? They're all.

[Robert Evans]

No, that's all of them. Right. That's the whole community. And like Anna was emailing directly, gave Ziz some of the advice that Ziz considered like key to her moving to the Bay Area and stuff. Right. Like these, these, these people, like the rationalists really, really want you to think that this was just like some fringe person. But she's very much tied in to all of this stuff, right? So for her part, Ziz doesn't deny that failing to convince other rationalists was part of why she pulled away from mainstream rationalism. But she's also going to claim that a big reason for her break is sexual abuse among people leading in the rationalist community. And there's a specific case that she'll cite later that doesn't happen until 2018. But this is a problem people were discussing when she's living on that boat. The representative story is the case of Sonia Joseph, who was the basis of that Bloomberg News piece I've quoted from a couple of times. And it's a bummer of a story. Sonia was 14 when she first read Yudkowski's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is set her on the path that led her to moving to the Bay Area in order to get involved in the rationalist EA set. And she's focused on the field of AI risk. And I'm going to read a.

[Sophie Lichterman]

This week has been so long that I completely erased the Harry Potter part of this story from my brain, it.

[Robert Evans]

Never drops too far below the surface. I cannot overemphasize how important this Harry Potter fan fiction is to all these murders. I mean this are like primary women getting abused. Yes, yes. It's a primary text of the movement. I'm going to read a quote from that Bloomberg article. Sonja was encouraged when she was 22 to have dinner with a 40ish startup founder in the rationalist sphere because he had a close connection to Peter Thiel. At dinner, the man bragged that Yudkowski had modeled a core Harry Potter like professor in that fanfic on him. Joseph says that he also argued that it was normal for a 12 year old girl to have sexual relationships with adult men and that such relationships were a noble way of transferring knowledge to a younger generation. Generation. Then she says he followed her home and insisted on staying over. She says he slept on the floor of her living room and that she felt unsafe until he left in the morning.

[David Borie]

Jesus.

[Robert Evans]

So great. You know, bragging about your Harry Potter, how you helped inspire the Harry Potter fanfic and then explaining how 12 year old girls should have sex with adult men. Good stuff, I gotta say. Rational.

[David Borie]

I gotta say that's a crazy brag. To get chicks.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, to get chicks.

[David Borie]

You know, it was, you know, one of those characters. I'm the snape.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I'm the snape of this. By the way, what do you think about 12 year olds?

[Danny Shapiro]

Oh, God damn.

[Robert Evans]

Also, I have a close connection to Peter Thiel.

[David Borie]

Yes.

[Danny Shapiro]

Cool.

[Robert Evans]

Oh man. As that Bloomberg article makes clear, this is not an isolated issue within rationalism. Quote, sexual harassment and abuse are distressingly common. According to interviews with eight women at all levels of the community, many young ambitious women described a similar trajectory. They were initially drawn in by the ideas, then became immersed in the social scene. Often that meant attending parties at EA or Rationalist group houses or getting added to jargon filled Facebook messenger chat groups with hundreds of like minded people. The eight women say casual misogyny threaded through the scene on the low end brick, the rationalist adjacent writer says a prominent rationalist once told her condescendingly that she was a 5 year old in a hot 20 year old's body. Relationships with much older men were common, as was polyamory. Neither was inherently harmful, but several women say those norms became tools to help influential older men get more partners. And this is also. This isn't just rationalism. That is the California ideology that is the Bay Area tech set. Right?

[David Borie]

Yeah, that's what I would say feels Very techy.

[Robert Evans]

Yes.

[David Borie]

Oh, man.

[Robert Evans]

And it's all super fucking gross. The whole you're a 5 year old in a hot 20 year old's body thing. Let's what the man. No.

[David Borie]

To say that.

[Robert Evans]

How do you say that? Not hurl yourself off the San Francisco Bay Bridge.

[David Borie]

That shit's vile.

[Robert Evans]

That's fucked up, dude. That's bad. Speaking of bad to the bone, our sponsors.

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[Robert Evans]

Signing up.

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[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

In 1997 in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like the Path of Worry, Dump Road and Fear Creek.

[Robert Evans]

Discoveries of Saturday. Investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman.

[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer. Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

[Robert Evans]

We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with nightmarish secrets from Tenderfoot.

[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

TV and iHeart podcasts. This is Le Mansre season two, the Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Danny Shapiro]

Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets.

[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

We were in the car like a Rolling Stone came on and he said, there's a line in there about your mother.

[Robert Evans]

And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened happened.

[Danny Shapiro]

These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets. Whether you've been on this journey with me from season one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us. I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities. Test our relationship and ultimately reveal who we truly are. Listen to Family secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Hey, I'm Kelly and some of you may know me as Laura Winslow. And I'm Telma, also known as Aunt Rachel. If those names ring a bell, then you probably are familiar with a show that we were both on back in the 90s called Family Matters. Kelly and I have done a lot of things in of front, played a.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Lot of roles over the years, but.

[Robert Evans]

Both of us are just so proud.

[Danny Shapiro]

To have been part of Family Matters.

[Robert Evans]

Did you know that we are one of the longest running sitcoms with a black cast? When we were making the show, there were so many moments filled with joy and laughter and cut up that I will never forget. Oh, girl, you got that right. The look that you all give me is so black. All black people know about the look. On each episode of welcome to the Family, we'll share personal reflections about making the show. Yeah, we'll even bring in part of the cast and some other special guests to join in the fun and spill some tea. Listen to welcome to the Family with.

[Danny Shapiro]

Telma and Kelly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Robert Evans]

Ah, we're back. So this is important to understand in a series about this very strange person and the strange belief that she developed that influence several murders. Ziz had many of the traits of a cult leader, but again, she's also a victim first of the cult dynamics inherent to rationalism. And what she's doing next is she breaks away with a small, loyal group of friends. And she does create a physical situation that much more resembles the kind of cults we're used to dealing with, particularly Scientology. Because next she's going to take, oh, wow. Me and Gwyn living alone on this boat, we kind of hate each other and neither of us is sleeping and our emotional health is terrible. But we've made so many much progress on our ideas. Maybe we should. Maybe we should make this a bigger thing, right? Maybe we should get a bunch of rationalists all living together on boats.

[David Borie]

She needs a work life balance.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, no, no, what she thinks she needs is. She calls it the rationalist fleet, which is she wants to get a bunch of community members to buy several boats and live anchored in the bay to avoid high Bay area rent so they can spend all their time talk and plotting out ideas for saving the cosmos. Oh, man.

[David Borie]

Great. And I get it, right?

[Robert Evans]

It's too expensive here.

[David Borie]

I Want to get some boats with my friends? It does sound cool.

[Robert Evans]

We won't go insane together, obviously, you know, she buys a 24 foot boat for $600 off of Craigslist. And I don't know much about boats, but I know you're not getting a good one for $600.

[David Borie]

No, no, like a full.

[Robert Evans]

Not a good living boat.

[David Borie]

Like a full boat.

[Robert Evans]

Like a 24 foot boat. Yes, a full boat.

[David Borie]

Oh man, that had to be a.

[Robert Evans]

Piece of shit to be a shitty, shitty boat.

[David Borie]

It's a colossal piece of shit.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. She names it the Black Signet. And she starts trying to convince some of her ideal these people who have gathered around her to get in on the project. Eventually, she, Danielson and a third person puts together the money to buy a boat that's gonna be like the center of their fight fleet. A 70 year old Navy tugboat named the Caleb, which was anchored in Alaska. This is like a 94 foot boat. It's a sizable boat and it is also very old and in terrible shape.

[David Borie]

That's the crown jewel of the fleet.

[Robert Evans]

Right? Right. That's our flagship.

[David Borie]

Oh man.

[Robert Evans]

So she and Danielson sail, they buy this thing with this third guy, Dan Powell, who's at least a Navy veteran. So like, like, you know, that's a good call. He's boat adjacent, but he's. I get the feeling nobody says this, but Powell says that he put tens of thousands of dollars into buying the Caleb. And I just know from what Danielson and Ziz wrote about their finances, neither of them had nearly that much money. So I think by far he invests the most in this project. And I don't want to insult the guy, but he says he did it because he, quote, considered buying the boat to be a good investment. Which boats aren't. Boats are never an investment, like comically.

[David Borie]

So, like known to be a terror.

[Robert Evans]

Nothing depreciates like fucking raw salmon. Depreciates slower than a boat. I think his attitude is, I'm gonna become like the slumlord of a bunch of, or at least landlord to a bunch of boat rationalists.

[David Borie]

But I think slumlord was correct.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know how you expect to pay off buying a 70 year old tugboat for a bunch of like poor rationalist punk kids to live in. How is that ever supposed to work? What's the PNL statement you put together here?

[Better Picks Advertiser]

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[David Borie]

Oh man. When, what was it? What was the, what was the timeline on him getting his money back?

[Robert Evans]

He thought, oh God, I have no idea. He he absolutely takes a bath on this shit. Right? Right. He claims, and I believe him, that Ziz lied to him about the whole scenario to get his money. I do think this was essentially a con from her. He says, quote, ziz led me to believe that she had established contacts in the bay and that it would be easy for us to at least get a slip, if not one that was approved for overnight use. And as it turns out, when we were coming through the Inside Passage from Alaska, it was revealed that we did not have a place to arrive.

[David Borie]

Wait, oh, I didn't realize he sailed it down from Alaska.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, they all sail it together. Them and a couple other rationals that they pick up. They make a post on the Internet being like, hey, any rationalists want to sail a boat down from Alaska, talk about our ideas while we live on a boat?

[David Borie]

Oh, man, these people need space.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, just get a warehouse. Yes, it's Oakland. Yeah, well, just get a warehouse. The ghost ship fire had happened by that point, so I don't think warehouse space was easy to get. Fair, fair, fair, fair. But I think this would have. I think you're right. In an earlier era, they would have just wound up living warehouse and maybe all died in a horrible fire because there were issues with that kind of life too, but they would have been an option besides the boat thing. Anyway, the Caleb is not in good shape. Again, this boat is 70 plus years old. It is only livable by punk standards. And while it was large enough, it is a 94 foot boat. You can keep some people on there. It's also way too big to anchor in most municipal marinas, especially since the boat has 3,000 gallons of incredibly toxic diesel fuel and it's not really seaworthy, which means there's this constant risk of poisoning the waters it sits in that the authorities are just going to be consistently like, guys, you can't have this here. Guys, you just. You simply can't have this here.

[David Borie]

So they just got to operate out in international waters like a cruise ship?

[Robert Evans]

No, they're just kind of illegally anchoring places and hoping that it's fine and periodically getting boarded over it. Another crew member on the ride down from Alaska who is just kind of there. They're just there, you know, for the adventure. So they leave and don't come back after they get to the bay. But this person expressed an opinion that Zym consistently came off as creepy but not scary. At one point, he says that she confronted him and told him he was transgender. And when he's like, no, I'm really not. She pressured him.

[David Borie]

She showed him he was.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, she does this a lot. Tells people, I know that you're. This. This is. And it works like that's how a number of her followers get to her. But she also. It doesn't work a lot of time. A lot of people are like, no, I'm not. You know, whatever it is you're saying, she does this to Gwyn too. So I don't do doubt his story. Like, she just kind of decides things about people and then tries to brute force them into accepting that about herself. And when there are people who are like, both desperate for like approval and affection and also who are housing insecure and need the boat or wherever to live with her, those people feel a lot. A number of them feel like a significant pull to just kind of accept whatever Ziz is saying about them. Yeah.

[David Borie]

I mean, when you're desperate in that way, you kind of definitely find yourself bending things to have a roof over your head, like, Right.

[Robert Evans]

Yep. And it's a very normal cult thing. Right. Like, this is an aspect of all of that kind of behavior. Now by this point, a few other people have come to live in the rationalist fleet. One of them is Emma Borhanian, a former Google engineer, and Alex Letham, a budding mathematician. The flotilla became a sort of marooned aquatic salon. Wired quotes Ziz as emailing to a friend at the time. We've been somewhat isolated from the rationalist community for a while and in the course developed a significant chunk of unique art of rationing and theories of psychology aimed at solving our problems. Excited for this psychology you built on the boat? Yeah. Wired continues. As Lasota articulated, their goals had moved beyond real estate into a more grandiose realm. We are trying to build a cabal, she wrote. The aim was to find abnormally intrinsically good people and turn them all into Gervais sociopaths, creating a fundamentally type of group than I have heard of existing before. Sociopathy, Lasota wrote, would allow the group members to operate unponed by the external world. Yeah.

[David Borie]

That is because you had said that before, right. That they had been. That's sort of what they're looking to be.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. They're obsessed with this idea of which is initially like kind of a joke about the office, but they're like, no, no, no. It actually is really good to have this sociopath at the top who like moves and manipulates these lesser fools and whatnot and puts them into positions below them. That's how we need what we need to be in order to gain control of the levels of power we have to make ourselves into. Ricky Gervais. Sociopaths.

[David Borie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Great. What a good ideology. I love that.

[David Borie]

They still love pop culture, though, you.

[Robert Evans]

Know, they're obsessed with it. And again, this is. You can't talk about this kind of shit if you're regularly having conversations with people outside of your bubble.

[David Borie]

It's the thing.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Borie]

If you have somewhere to go. If you have anywhere to go. This can't be.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Yes. If you've got a friend who's like a nurse or a contractor, they have drinks with once a week and you just talk about your ideas once, they're gonna be like, hey, this is bad. You need to stop. You're going down a bad road. Do you need to stay with me? Are you okay?

[David Borie]

This is clearly like a cousin.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Someone. This is.

[David Borie]

Would be so upsetting for someone to just casually talk about it like a paint and sip or whatever.

[Robert Evans]

Like Ricky Gervais. Yeah, Rick. So by this point, their breaks with mainstream rationalism had gone terminal. Gwyn criticized the rest of the central rationalist community for, quote, not taking heroic responsibility for the outcome of this world. In addition to the definitely accurate claims of sexual abuse within rationalism, they alleged organizations like CFAR were actively transphobic. I don't know how true that is. Some of the articles I've read, there's a lot of trans rationalists who will be like, no, there's a very high population of trans people within the rationalist community community. So people disagree about this. It's not my place to come to a conclusion, but this is one of the things that Ziz says about the central rationalist community. Ziz had concluded that transgender people were the best people to build a cabal around because they, quote from Ziz's blog, had unusually high life force. Ziz believed that the mental powers locked within the small community of simpatico rationalists they'd gathered together were enough to alter the fate of the cosmos if everyone could be jailbroken into sociopaths.

[David Borie]

And these are all double goods as well.

[Robert Evans]

Well, no, she's the only double good, actually. She becomes increasingly convinced that they're all just single good. Right. And this is like her beliefs about heroism from the last episode. If you've got the community and the hero, the community's job is to support the hero. Right?

[David Borie]

Like, no matter what. It was like, blind support. Right.

[Robert Evans]

Blind support, no matter what. And a lot of the language this is using here, in addition to being, you know, rationalist language, this is all like Scientology mixed with gaming and fantasy media. She talks about the need to install new mental tech on she and her friends, which is like, tech is like a Scientology term, right? Like that's. That's like a. A big thing that they say. She and her circle start dressing differently. Ziz starts wearing like all black robes and stuff to make her look like a Sith or some sort of wizard. Her community adopts the name vegan anarcho transhuman and starts unironically referring to themselves as vegan Sith around this man.

[David Borie]

They should be in the boat community when they move in.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, just like, what the fuck is going on? I just wanted to. I'm just an alcoholic. What's happening? I just wanted to be like Quint from Jaws. Oh, no. Yeah.

[David Borie]

I'm just here cause my wife left me.

[Danny Shapiro]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

I think I might die a different way than a great white attack. Now this is looking bad.

[David Borie]

Yikes.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man. So around this time, Gwyn claims she came up with a tactic for successfully separating and harnessing the power of different hemispheres of someone's brain. The tactic was unihemispheric sleep. And this is a process by which only one half of your brain sleeps at a time. In a critical write up published as a warning before the killings that are to come, a rationalist named Apollo Mohave writes, normally, it is not possible for human beings to sleep with only one human. However, a weak form of UHS can be achieved by stimulating one half of the body and resting the other. Like hypnosis or fasting. This is a vulnerable psychological state for a person. Entering UHS requires the sleeper to be exhausted. It also has disorienting effects. So they are not quite themselves. And I disagree with them that, like, there's no. They're not just actually sleeping with only one hemisphere. And in fact, I think they may have taken this idea from Warhammer 40,000. That's so funny, because it seems brains do, because.

[David Borie]

Yeah, what are you talking about?

[Robert Evans]

But yeah, that doesn't. That's not a thing. Like, you know that. Like. Yes, if you don't let yourself sleep for long periods of time and like, kind of let yourself zone into a meditative state, you'll get a trippy effect. Like, you will become altered. You're altering your state. And you can. In fact, this is why cults deprive people of sleep. You can fuck with people's heads a lot when they're in that space, but this isn't what's happening.

[David Borie]

I like to think of them on. On the boat, just only using one half of their body.

[Robert Evans]

Right? Right. Like one eye open, watching the office.

[David Borie]

Furiously taking notes.

[Robert Evans]

So this is how that write up describes the process of uni hemispheric sleep. One, you need to be tired. Two, you need to be laying down or sitting up. It is important that you stay in a comfortable position that won't require you to move very much. In either case, you want to close one eye and keep the other open. Distract the open eye with some kind of engagement. Eventually you should feel yourself begin to fall asleep on one side. That side will also become numb. The degree of numbness is a good way to track how deep into sleep the side is. Once into uhs, it is supposed to be possible to infer which aspects of your personality are associated with which side of the brain. And the goal of unihemispheric sleep is to jailbreak the mind into psychopathy fully. Right. In Zizz's. That's how Ziz describes it.

[David Borie]

That's the goal.

[Robert Evans]

That's the goal.

[David Borie]

That's their goal.

[Robert Evans]

Gotta make ourselves into psychopaths so we can save the world. But it also gets used. You can use it to like, I have this thing. I don't like that I react this way in this situation. So get me into this sleep pattern and you like, talk me through and we'll figure out why I'm doing it and we'll. They describe it as using tech to upgrade their mental capabilities. Right? So they're just kind of brainwashing each other. They're like fucking around with. With some pretty potentially dangerous stuff. And again, drugs are definitely involved in a lot of aspects of this, which, which is not usually written up. But you, you just have to infer, given that there's some disagreement or there's some disagreements, disagreement around all this. But it seems accurate to say that Gwyn is the one who came up with the uni hemispheric sleep idea. But a lot of the language around how this tactic was used and what it was supposed to do came from Ziz. And again, the process is just sleep deprivation. Right? This is cult stuff. It's part of how cults brainwash people. But it also wouldn't have seemed inherently suspicious to rationalists because part of that subculture, being part of that subculture and going to those events had already normalized a slightly less radical version of this behavior. As this piece in Bloomberg explains, at house parties, rationalists spent time debugging each other, engaging in a confrontational style of interrogation that would supposedly yield more rational thoughts. Sometimes to probe further, they experimented with psychedelics and tried jailbreaking their minds to crack open their consciousness and make them more influential or agentic. Several people in Taylor, and this is one of the sources sphere, had similar psychotic episodes. One died by suicide in 2018 and another in 2021. So in the mainstream rationalist subculture, they are also trying to like consciously hack their brains using a mix of like drugs and meditation and like social abuse. And people kill themselves as a result of like the outcomes of this. This is already a problem in the mainstream subculture.

[David Borie]

Yeah. Let alone this extremist offshoot, right?

[Robert Evans]

Yep. In her own writings at the time, Ziz describes hideous fights with Gwyn in which Gwyn tries to mentally dominate and mind control Ziz. They've both become believers in a new theory Ziz has that's basically like, she uses the term mana, which she is, she describes as like your ability to persuade people, which is if you can convince someone of something, it's evidence that you have an inherent level of like, magical power. And someone with naturally high mana, like Ziz can literally mind control people with low, low mana. That's what she believes she's doing whenever she like tries to talk someone into something about that themselves as she's mind controlling them. And she and Gwyn have mind control battles. At one point they start having like a one of these arguments where basically Gwyn threatens to mind control Ziz and Ziz threatens Gwyn back and this starts a verbal escalation. And the way Ziz describes this escalation, which is again, these are two sleep deprived, traumatized people fucking with each other's heads on a boat. But the way that Ziz describes the escalation cycle is going to be important because this is, this has a lot to do with the logic of the murders that are to come. I said that if they were going to defend a right to be attacking me on some level and treat fighting back as a new aggression and cause to escalate, I would not at any point back down. And if our conflicting definitions of the ground state where no further retaliation was necessary, meant that we were consigned to a runaway positive feedback loop of revenge, so be it. And if that was true, we might as well try to kill each other right then and there in the darkness of the Caleb's bridge at night, where we were both sitting lying under things in a cramped space, I became intensely worried they could stand up faster. Consider the idea from World War I. Mobilization is tantamount to a declaration of war. I stood up, still silent, waiting. So you see, first off, and there's.

[David Borie]

Other people there as well.

[Robert Evans]

It's not just yes and just like the lodgings. Well, obviously if you attack me, then I'm going to counter attack you, and then you're going to counter attack me, which means eventually we'll kill each other. So we should just kill each other now. Like when you are taking your advice on how to handle social conflict from the warring European powers that got into World War I. Maybe not a good positive example.

[David Borie]

It's just so, like, even in understanding how they got there, it still is such a stress. Like, even having all this back, it's still like really taking some leaps.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I mean, just having a fight with your friend and then opening your locket, which has Kaiser Wilhelm and the Tsar in it, and going, what would you guys do here?

[David Borie]

Ancestors guide me.

[Robert Evans]

And again, part of what's going on here is this timeless decision theory bullshit. Right. Ziz believes that she makes it clear at this point when they start having a conflict, that the stakes will immediately escalate to life or death. Gwyn won't risk fucking with her. Right. But by doing this, she also immediately creates a situation where she feels unsafe. However, in that conflict, Gwyn yields and Ziz concludes that the technique works. Right.

[David Borie]

So then her mana must be.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes, what she thinks it is. Her mana's strong and this is a good idea for handling all conflicts. Right. So I'm going to increasingly teach all these people who are listening to me that this is the, like, escalation loop that you handle every conflict with. Right. Great stuff. One of the young people who got drawn to Zizz at this time was Maya Pasek, who blogged under the name Squirrel in Hell. She wrote about mainstream rationalist stuff, citing Yudkowski and Elon Musk. But in her blog, there's like a pattern of depressive thought. In one 2016 post, she mused about whether or not experiencing joy and awe might be bad because it biases your perception. So this is. This is a young person who I think is probably is dealing with a lot of depressive issues.

[David Borie]

Yeah, classic stinking thinking, as they say.

[Robert Evans]

Right. And maybe the community's not super helpful to her. She was working to create a rationalist community in the Canary Islands. She's kind of trying to do the same thing Ziz did. But, like, in an island where it's cheaper to live, is this a thing.

[David Borie]

That can exist a lot of places?

[Robert Evans]

Like. Sure, yeah. I mean, yeah, if you've got Cheap rent. You can get a bunch of like weirdos who work online to move into a house with you.

[David Borie]

Right? Fair.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Like that's always possible. She found Ziz's blog and she starts commenting on it. She's particularly drawn to Ziz's theories on mana and Zinn's theory and Gwyn's theory about hemispheric personalities. In one of her most direct cult leader moments, Ziz reaches out directly to this to Maya as she's like posting on her blog and emails her saying, I see you liked some of my blog posts. Truly a sinister opening.

[David Borie]

Yeah, no, that's a bad guy.

[Robert Evans]

My true companion. Gwyn and I are taking a somewhat different than Miria. That's the organization. Organization one in the rationalist organization approaches.

[David Borie]

Is that what they call each other? That's how they refer to each other.

[Robert Evans]

They're true companions. True companions at this point or taking a somewhat different approach than Miri approach to saving the world without much specific technical disagreements. We are running on somewhat pointed to by the approach. As long as you expect the world to burn, then change course. Right. So basically we still expect the world to burn, so we can't keep doing what the other rationalists are doing. And she lays out to this girl she meets through a blog post her plan to find abnormally intrinsically good people and jailbreak them into Gervais sociopaths. She invites Maya to come out and it's I don't think this happened. But they do start separately journeying into unbucketing. And Maya gets really into this uni hemispheric sleep thing. And Ziz is kind of like coaching her through the process. She tells Maya that one of her hemispheres is female because Maya is a transition trans woman. And Ziz tells her one of your brain hemispheres, each of which is a separate person, is female, but the other is male and quote, mostly dead. And your suicidal impulses are caused by both the pain of being trans and also the fact that there's this dead man living in your head that's like taking up half of your brain's space. And so you really need to debuck it in order to have a chance of surviving. Right. Okay.

[David Borie]

So she needs to be jailbroken to.

[Robert Evans]

Be free to be free. And Maya will basically replace her sleep entirely with this uni hemispheric sleep crap, which exacerbates not sleeping, exacerbates your depressive swings and leads to deeper and deeper trials of suicidal ideation. She is believed to have died by suicide In February of 2018, she posts a what is essentially a suicide note that is very rationalist in its verbiage, literally titled decision theory and suicide. And this is the first death directly related to Ziz and Gwyn's ideas. But I think it's important to note that like, the role mainstream rationalism plays in all of this. Suicide is a common topic at CFAR events and people will argue constantly about whether or not like a low value individual, it's better for them to kill themselves. Right. Is that like a higher net value to the world? Um, and it was also used as like a threat to stop women who were abused by figures in the community from speaking up. And this is from that Bloomberg article. One woman in the community who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisals says she was sexually abused by a prominent AI researcher. After she confronted him, she says she had job offers rescinded and conference speaking gigs canceled and was disinvited from AI events. She said others in the community told her allegations of misconduct harmed the advancement of AI safety and one person suggested an agentic option would be to kill herself. So there is just within rationalism, this discussion of like, it can be agentic, as in like you are taking high agency for your to kill yourself if you're, if you're net, if you're going to be a net harm to the cause of AI safety, which you will be by reporting this AI researcher who molested you. Right? Yeah.

[David Borie]

Because you're taking them, man. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Shit, these people are like all this whole community is playing with a lot of deeply dangerous stuff and a bunch of people are going to have their brains either kill themselves or suffer severe trauma as a result of all of this. Yeah.

[David Borie]

Escaping this is even putting yourself back together after living this way. Seems like it would be such a task again.

[Robert Evans]

And like any cult, part of the difficulty, difficulties like teaching yourself how to speak normally again, how to not talk about all this stuff. Right.

[David Borie]

Yeah. Not identify as a vegan Sith, like at work.

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right. Because like, I gotta say, like there's. And people who are really in the community will note like a dozen different other concepts and terms in addition to like vegan Sith and Gervais sociopaths and shit that I'm not talking about that are important to ziz's ideology. But like, you just can't. Like I had to basically learn a different language to do these episodes and I'm not fluent in it. Right. You have to triage. Like, what shit do you need to know?

[David Borie]

Yeah, it's so deep. It's so deep.

[Robert Evans]

Deep and silly. Let's do an ad break and then we'll be done. And we're back. So I'm just gonna conclude this little story and then we'll end the episode for the day. So this person, Maya has likely killed themselves at the start of 2018. And Ziz reacts to this suicide in her usual manner. She blogs about it. She took from what had happened. Not that like debucketing might be dangerous and unihemispheric sleep might be dangerous, but that explaining hemispheric consciousness to people was an infohazard. She believed that people who were single, good, like Maya, were at elevated risk because learning that one of the whole persons inside, inside them was evil or mostly dead could create irreconcilable conflict leading to depression and suicide. And she, she comes up with a name for this. She calls this Pasek's Doom. That's what she like, names the infohazard that kills her friend who she's like fucking with their head. So that's nice. Yeah.

[David Borie]

As nice as anything else in this story has been.

[Robert Evans]

I think you might have been the doom here.

[David Borie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Borie]

I wish that you were the whole problem. But now it's an infohazard. To explain a person's like.

[Robert Evans]

To explain your theories. Yeah, yeah.

[David Borie]

To a person who can't handle it, I guess.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. She comes to the conclusion it's a particular danger to explain to single good trans women who are the primary group of people that she is going after in terms of trying to recruit folks. So she, like, admits her belief is that this thought thing I've come up with is particularly dangerous to the community I'm recruiting from. But it's the only. It's essential. This information is absolutely essential to saving the world. So you just have to roll the dice. Yeah.

[David Borie]

It isolates herself within her own group that she's created.

[Robert Evans]

Well, yes. And it also, she is then consciously taking the choice. I know this is likely to kill or destroy a lot of the people I reach out to, but I think it's so important that it's like worth taking that risk with their life. Lives. Yep. Good stuff. Yeah. Anyway, how you feeling? Gotta keep a plug.

[David Borie]

I am, I, I am. Okay. I'm, I'm. I. You know what? I'm deeply sad for these people who are so lost. And I'm also pretty interested because this is crazy, but I'm okay.

[Robert Evans]

I'll be great. Happy to, Happy to. Happy. Happy to see that. Well, everybody, this has been behind the Bastards. A podcast about things that you maybe didn't think, maybe didn't need to know about how the Internet breaks people's brains. But also, a lot of people surprisingly close to this community are running the government now. So maybe you do need to know about it. Sorry about that, Infohazard.

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In 1997 in Belgium, 37 female body parts placed in 15 trash bags were found at dump sites with evocative names like the Path of Worry, Dump Road, and Fear Creek.

[Robert Evans]

Discoveries of Saturday Investigators made a new discovery yesterday afternoon of the torso of a woman.

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Investigators believe it is the work of a serial killer. Despite a sprawling investigation, including assistance from the American FBI, the murders have never been solved. Three decades later, we've unearthed new evidence and new suspects.

[Robert Evans]

We felt like we were in the presence of someone who was going to the grave with with nightmarish secrets from.

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Tenderfoot TV and iHeart podcasts. This is La Monstre season two, the Butcher of Moss, available now. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Danny Shapiro]

Hi, I'm Danny Shapiro, host of the hit podcast Family Secrets.

[Tenderfoot TV Narrator]

We were in the car like a Rolling Stone came on and he said, there's a line in there about your mother.

[Robert Evans]

And I said, what? What I would do if I didn't feel like I was being accepted is choose an identity that other people can't have. I knew something had happened to me in the middle of the night, but I couldn't hold on to what had happened.

[Danny Shapiro]

These are just a few of the moving and important stories I'll be holding space for on my upcoming 13th season of Family Secrets. Whether you've been on this journey with me from season in one or just joining the Family Secrets family, we're so happy to have you with us. I'll dive deep into the incredible power of secrets, the ones that shape our identities, test our relationships, and ultimately reveal who we truly are. Listen to Family secrets on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get.

[Robert Evans]

Your podcasts like, if we're on the.

[David Borie]

Air here and I literally have my contract here and I'm looking at, you.

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[David Borie]

I really just had never experienced anything like what was going on in the city as far as, like, you know, seeing so many young, black, affluent creatives in all walks of life.

[Robert Evans]

The church had dwindled almost to nothing.

[David Borie]

And God said, this is your assignment. And that's like, how you know, like, okay.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, you from Atlanta for real?

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[Robert Evans]

Shut up.

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[Robert Evans]

We're back. Oh, my gosh. It's behind the Bastards, a podcast where Robert Evans ruined his life by reading too many blogs by Internet poisoned, nerd, rationalist people. And I deeply regret everything I've done. How are you doing, David?

[David Borie]

I'm good. I am. I am concerned for you. This is a difficult place for you to spend.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I've had an. This is an infohazard. They're not wrong to use that term, just not in the way they mean it.

[David Borie]

Yeah, exactly.

[Robert Evans]

This whole, like, I'm half committed to, like, selling my house, putting my goats into, like, a big trailer, and traveling around the country, finding people who are going on online doom loops and like, handing them a goat. Just, like, play with this goat for 20 minutes. Like, touch it. Touch an animal. Look into its weird little eyes. Get off of your phone.

[David Borie]

That's real. You need to go do goat yoga.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Something has to be done.

[David Borie]

Oh, my God. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

This is.

[David Borie]

It's so wild. It's so wild.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Again, folks, if you want to immunize your stuff to this, a great way to do it is to just, like, have friends who don't live in a boat with you. Right.

[Sophie Lichterman]

A very small boat. Yeah, Barely a boat.

[Robert Evans]

Even a big boat. Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Let alone barely a boat.

[Robert Evans]

And talk to, like, you know, My neighbor's like a Mexican dude who loves gardening and has had a completely different life than me and knows nothing of the Internet. And I talk with him a couple of times a week. And it's always one of the best things for me because I spend so much of the rest of my time with people like Gary Garrison who are all like, poison their brains with the same things I've poisoned my brain with. Like, please go find people who don't know all of the weird Internet things you do and spend more time with them.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Aggressive on the people like Garrison.

[Robert Evans]

Look, I love Garrison, but they also have started spending a lot of their time with people who aren't in the same weird Internet doom circles that we are. And it's been good for them. It's good for everyone, truly. Save yourselves. Save yourselves.

[David Borie]

It doesn't have to be like this.

[Robert Evans]

So when we left off, Ziz had kind of psychologically jailbroken her friend into suicide and then created an infohazard named after her friend. Yes, great stuff. Healthy community. Now, a few things happen in quick succession after this point. The rationalists start to blame pat suicide on Ziz. And this is really when a lot of folks in rationalist circles start breaking off and calling, like, saying like, hey, this is what Ziz and Gwyn are doing. They've made like a cult. Right. And again, I don't think they're really off base here. But also they tend to ignore all of the suicides in the rationalist community.

[David Borie]

I wouldn't say they're in a cult.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, you know, it's more because cult is, I think, like, you get like, they're in a. There's a cultic mean you that rationalism forms, which is like the substrate. Right. You know, if a cult is like a plant growing up from it, like, rationalism is this soil that is extremely optimized for growing cults. I think that might be closer, you know, Although it's also one of those things where if you're just trying to explain the storm, you could just say it's a cult. You can say it's this weird Bay Area cult about science and AI and shit. Like, that's probably close enough. Yeah. Um, a few things happen in quick succession after this point. One is that a story broke later in 2018 confirming Ziz's suspicion that the rationalism rationalist community was rife with abuse. Two people accused an influential rationalist who worked at sefar, a guy named Brent Dill, of abuse while they were dating him. Both were 19 and he was close to 40. The allegations here remind me a little of the ones against Neil Gaiman. You've got a very powerful man accused of coercing much younger women into extreme BDSM situations, implying them with drugs. I. Obviously, none of this is. I don't think any of this has been litigated, so I will continue to refer to them as allegations. I don't know exactly what happened here, but this breaks, right? And it's a big deal within the community. Rumors spread that CFAR had kind of tried to, like, hush the whole mess down. In order to protect this guy, they conducted an internal investigation. We all know, like, when the cops do an internal investigation, right? That's always reliable. No.

[David Borie]

Trust us to figure out. Figure it out.

[Robert Evans]

We'll police ourselves. That's rational. This internal investigation exonerated Dill and included the line, he is aligned with SEFAR's goals and strategy and should be seen as an ally who embodies a rare kind of agency and a sense of heroic responsibility. There's those words again. Agency, heroic responsibility. Dating a 19 year old when you're 40 and giving her drugs.

[Better Picks Advertiser]

She explains.

[Robert Evans]

Good stuff. People respond with outrage. Seafar eventually, eventually banned Dill from future events. They kind of cave. And Ziz would describe Dill later as a true negative. That's someone who. Both halves of their brain are evil.

[David Borie]

Double bad.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, double bad. Now, at this point, she still thought Yadkowski and some other CFAR leaders might be double good, but she's really not sure about it. And she's especially not sure because none of them embrace this terminology.

[David Borie]

I was gonna say, at this point, has Yudkowski. Has he, like, is she still. Are they on good terms? Is he still acknowledging? No. Okay.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think she's ever on close terms with Yudkowski. She is speaking and communicating directly with Anna Salomon, who is like, one of Yudkowski's, like, top people quite a lot. I don't think she's super close to Yudkowski. Like, I'm sure they're at the same events and stuff several times. She definitely sees him speak. She definitely talks with him. But, like, I. I don't think that they would ever have been close. Right.

[David Borie]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

She does try to force a conversation with Anna Salomon outside of SEAFAR HQ about this and other discoveries she and Gwyn had made on their boats. And Ziz, like, writes in the blog post about it that, like, she felt it was going pretty good and Anna was listening to her. There are context clues that I don't think Ziz picks up on that. Like, oh no. Anna immediately felt uncomfortable and like you were assaulting her, like coming up to her and just like kind of barraging her with all of this nonsen. And she did not want to have this conversation and she kind of pretended to be agree with you in order to end this because she's not sure if you're dangerous, which to be fair, you are.

[David Borie]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Soon later, at a CFAR board meeting, Anna recommended that ZIZ be disinvited from joint MIRI CIFAR events. And both of these are separate organizations, but basically like the membership overlaps or like a certain circle. Right. Her reasoning for not wanting ZIZ at events is that ZIZ wore quote, black clothes, took supervillains as role models and came up with dangerous plans. Yeah, yeah, More or less correct.

[David Borie]

Yeah, pretty much. I forgot that she was also wearing black robes.

[Robert Evans]

She's also started dressing like a wizard. Yes. Speaking of dangerous plans, the Rationalist fleet, or RAT fleet, was falling apart. By this point. Coast Guard and San Mateo Harbor District authorities had issued numerous warnings over the danger of this tugboat leaking poison into the bay. On several occasion, the Caleb nearly hit other ships while drifting. Like the anchor gets fucked up. I don't know that they, they probably don't know how to use it. Cause like they're.

[David Borie]

The Navy guy, he let. Is he still involved?

[Robert Evans]

He's gone. He is in, but he's bounced. He had at least the judgment to cut his losses.

[David Borie]

So they don't even know how to work boats particularly.

[Robert Evans]

They do. Gwyn is, I think Gwyn's actually reasonably competent with a sailboat.

[David Borie]

Gwen has a sailboat, right.

[Robert Evans]

And Ziz gets trained up. And these are both smart enough people that I suspect they're competent with a sailboat, but like a 24 foot sailboat and a 94 foot tugboat, very different. That's like, I'm good with driving my Prius. Give me that fucking 18 wheeler with two fucking storage containers on the back, shipping containers on the back. I could probably back that thing into a parking space, no problem. They're just different, you know.

[Danny Shapiro]

Damn.

[Robert Evans]

Damn Authorities, right? And what's very funny, these accounts of like boat cops getting on the Caleb and talking to Zizians. They're like, these people must be sovereign citizens, which is like a totally different kind of thing. And to me I'm like, they don't sound at all like. But to them it like this mix because it's this mix of anarchist theory, right? Because these People are anarchists. So they're telling these cops why they don't think the cops have any authority, but they're also, like, insulting them with these, like, logical arguments based on obscure, rational, nationalist doctrines. And these cops.

[David Borie]

Heavy jargon, right? Heavy, heavy jargon.

[Robert Evans]

These cops are just like, okay, so we got some sovereign. Some SOB sits here. All right.

[David Borie]

Yeah, yeah, okay.

[Robert Evans]

They're out of.

[David Borie]

It's a 284. Now we know what to do.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah. And again, this is, like, the Bay Area. I think cops in the Bay Area are a little. Especially since they're all white, more used to dealing with, like, people who are clearly, like, eccentric, right? Than maybe, like, if this had happened in another city. So nothing. There's not really a conflict yet. The cops are just being like, hey, guys, you're this. But to be fair, the boat is leaking diesel into the bay. Like, see, it is a problem, right?

[David Borie]

That's a net negative.

[Robert Evans]

In 2019, another scandal hits the rationalist community. The story broke that a former employee had blackmailed the company over a dispute and used donor funds to pay. This got stacked on top of the scandal that Dill had just created. And as Ziz and many of her comrades saw it, the issue was not whether this employee had been mistreated, but that Miri hadn't made the proper timeless decisions to ensure they couldn't be blackmailed, per an article for the Rolling Stone quote, In their view, this not only represented bad decision theory, but called the organization's entire existence into question. In other words, it's not whatever happened with this employee, it's that you didn't make the timeless decisions to make it so that anyone would be scared to try to blackmail you, because they'd know that your response was so. Would be so intense. That proves you don't have what it takes to really save the world, because you're not ruthless enough to just jump to killing people like us.

[David Borie]

You're not a psychopath.

[Robert Evans]

You're not a fucking psychopath, right?

[David Borie]

We need psychopaths, which is good to save the world.

[Robert Evans]

We love psychopaths.

[David Borie]

We're all. We aspire to it.

[Robert Evans]

And one of the big problems within the rationalist community is people talk about different mental health conditions as if they're like tools in a toolbox. Like, you can go into a psychopathic mode, and that's really good for accomplishing these things. Or you could. You could go adhd. You can make yourself autistic in this. They talk this way, right? I'm not saying this is. This is not how anything works. I'm not comparing autism and psychopathy. I'm just saying this is how they talk, right?

[David Borie]

Yeah, they go sicko mode and then save the world.

[Robert Evans]

Right? And I was like, no, that's. That's not. None of this is accurate to, like, the way brains are. Like, that's not how anything works.

[David Borie]

You can't just be like, I'm gonna turn off my autism today. I got some shit to eat.

[Robert Evans]

No, that's not how it works. And some of this is downstream from how I think online discourse has damaged the discussion of mental health because people sometimes do talk about it, like Pokemon, you know, very much. I think there's some issues there that do. Anyway, and a lot of this is. Yeah, it's just this soup is not exclusive to ziz. So ZIZ is banned now from Miri CIFAR events and her whole crew is increasingly radicalized against the organizations they have. Also, you know, it's both where, like, SEAFAR has good reason to not want ZIZ around, but also all of ziz. Most of ziz's complaints about rationalists like SIFA and Miri are very valid. Right? Like, yeah, yeah, you're both right about each other. It's like how Elon Musk and Peter Thiel would shit talk each other. It's like, you both do have each other's number. Yes.

[David Borie]

No, everybody's got a point. Everybody's got a point here.

[Robert Evans]

I just kind of wish you would all go away. In November of 2019, Sefar held their annual alumni reunion out in a chunk of the California Redwoods down the street from the Bohemian. Bohemian growth. The road that passes is literally the Bohemian highway. Right? This is like, for an idea of how much money there is in mainstream rationalism, right? They are having their big party next to Bohemian Grove. Ziz had sent an open letter in, like, a letter to Yudkowski a few days earlier, urging members of both organizations to quit in the interest of saving the world. Basically saying, these groups are so compromised they can no longer add effectively to the things we're trying to do to our important work. So you should all leave. And kind of the subtext is, and do what me and Gwyn are doing. You know, start a cult. So on, on the day of this event, Ziz, Gwyn and two others in their circle drive up to this, like, this location out in the woods with a box truck, a shuttle bus and a Prius, and they block the entrances and exits of the venue with their vehicles. And they jump out wearing black robes, Guy fawkes masks and black gloves. Now, this is not a violent protest. I have. There's no evidence that they intended violence. They had walkie talk. One person had a can of Mace, but people carry mace. That's not suspicious. And all they're trying to do is distribute flyers, lying out their case against Sifar and Mirri, but they have blocked the entrances and exits and they talk like sith wizards. Right. So everything they say sounds cryptic and kind of threatening.

[David Borie]

And they're wearing black robes and they're.

[Robert Evans]

Wearing and Guy Fawkes masks. The police get called immediately, and as best as I can tell, it does. Maybe I'm wrong. It seems like the Sifarmiri people like, like new because there's like send out an email saying, hey, maybe don't come. Or like, if you do, just like, be note that these weird people are here. But the venue owner, like the people running the venue call the cops is what it seems like happens. There are different allegations here, I don't precisely know. But for whatever the case, two false pieces of information are given to the cops when they get called. They are told. The cops are told one person has a gun and another person has an. An axe. Right. So. And I think it's people who worked at the venue or make these allegations. It was definitely an employee at the venue who alleged that he saw an ax. A county sheriff who responded, or, sorry, it was a person at the venue who picked up an ax and someone saw them and reported that to the police too. Right. Because he was scared of these people. A county sheriff, sheriff's deputy responds and immediately calls for major backup because he's told someone has a gun. And, you know, as a cop with just kind of like a pop culture knowledge, you hear like a bunch of people in robes and masks with a gun outside of this big event where, like, there's children doing a ropes course next door. Like, his thought is, there's a mass shooting brewing. Right. Some people are going to do something fucked up. Right, Right. So he calls for a massive, like, SWAT response, basically, you know, compared to the actual danger these people present, which is right, right now, nil. The author of that Wired piece spoke to the sheriff's deputy who responded initially, a guy named Parks. And this is that account quote in Parks's account, which he relayed to me in the fall of 2023 at a local Starbucks. The protesters were speaking in unison. Just stuff I didn't really understand, but it was somewhat rehearsed. He said the group had printed flyers outlining their complaints against Sefar and Miri. They alleged that Miri had paid out blackmail using donor funds to quash sexual misconduct allegations, and that Sefar's leader discriminates against trans women. Other allegations were more esoteric. CFAR does not appreciably develop novel rationality mental tech. The path to avoiding extinction, they wrote, involved escaping containment by society through mental autonomy and interhemispheric game theory. So. So random sheriff's deputy is not going to understand what's going on here.

[David Borie]

What the fuck are you talking.

[Robert Evans]

He and his men default to the thing that cops do when they get confused, which is they get violent. Right. He and Ricks ordered the protesters to get on the ground. As they did, each one called out, demanding a same gender pat down, like one might request at an airport. All three were trans women, but Parks says he couldn't discern their genders because of the robes and masks. Regardless, they were not going to get that luxury at that time, he told me. It's like, well, we don't know if you're a boy or a girl and we gotta handcuff you. Parks deputies subdued the three in prone positions, what Parks calls a high risk style takedown, requiring more force than a normal handcuffing style. So there's a. Several articles I've read will refer to a discrepancy between how the Zizians and the cops describe these events. I've read both accounts. I really don't see a gap. What I see is the cops describing their violent and dehumanizing behavior as like, this is the normal way to respond. And the Zizians describing it as dehumanizing and traumatizing. The only question here is, like, the moral quality you give to the cops tackling a bunch of people basically, who don't have weapons because they got a phone call, right? Which, like, if you're a cop, you're like, well, this is the only way to act. And if you're. I think most people, like, you're like, well, probably could have just talked this situation down. I don't see where an arrest like, yeah. Gwen later writes this about the experience. When we arrived, a staff member called the police and falsely told them we had a gun and that we were going into buildings and that. That we were too afraid to get off the. They were too afraid to get off the phone. Later reports said there was an active shooter with a duffel bag. None of us had a duffel bag. Police arrived with their guns out and we were in. Immediately arrested within about 10 minutes of us arriving, after which we were sexually assaulted. In my case, I was groped and I had my pants pulled down and then sat on by an officer in a mounting position. They are mocked and derided like as they're naked cops are making comments about their bodies. It's like a really like ugly situation. Right. And I have no trouble believing that this is true because it comports with dozens of arrest stories I've heard in multiple, multiple states.

[David Borie]

Yeah, that's par for the course.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And it's also the fact that they are specifically the police are making fun of them for being trans is very much in line with what statistics say about trans people and police violence. A 2013 report from the Anti Violence Project found that trans individuals are seven times likelier to experience violence while interacting with the police than cisgender people. So I have no trouble believing Gwen's accounts here, even though again, I treat her with proper scrutiny in most areas. This all seems like what cops do. Now the other big discrepancy where the Zizians are, I think a little off base is that they claim they are immediately deadnamed and misgendered by the newspapers covering their initial arrests. And they are deadnamed, but the newspapers don't really have an option here.

[David Borie]

Right. Their legal names.

[Robert Evans]

Right. They don't talk when they're arrested. Right. Which is a very normal thing for like a protest. They say absolutely nothing and they have no ID on them. So the police fingerprint them, which brings up their legal names and that's what's given to the newspapers. So like the initial news articles aren't that's just the only name available. But it escalates this situation. Right. And it is worth noting that a number of outlets do continue to deadname them up to the present. But that initial reporting, it's like, well, that's just the only information that was available. But all of this is going to like this court case is going to wear on. They get charged initially with felonies. Bayless said it like 50 grand. For Ziz and Gwynne, this is eventually reduced and they're reduced to misdemeanors. But it takes like four days for them to make bail. And they will be fighting because they're going to countersue over these arrests. And both the trauma of the arrests, their anger over them, and the fact that there's the stress of this years long court battle is going to have this extremely deleterious effect on everybody's mental health when they're already not doing well. Right. It's great stuff. Yeah. Right around this time, the Zizians move. They stop doing their fleet thing, right. They move out of the boats and they kind of end things by leaving their tugboat adrift. Because there's nothing to do with a 94 foot tugboat. Nobody can handle a tugboat. Right. Like, it's too big to do much with. And they probably could have figured something out, but they decide the opportunity cost of figuring out how to dispose of this boat is it will distract from their important work. So it's okay for it to sink and cause like a modest environmental crisis by leaking diesel into the bay. Basically, Ziz decides that the value of all the sea life that it kills is less than the value of them continuing their work, which at this point, if you're keeping track, is trying to figure out how to live out of box trucks. So that's what they're doing now. And this is where a guy named Curtis.

[David Borie]

They got a worse living space.

[Robert Evans]

They've got a worse living space. They made it worse than boats. Oh, boy. I can't tell you how much of this story is just the result of Bay Area rent prices being unreasonable.

[David Borie]

It's really a real estate story.

[Robert Evans]

It's a real. Just like Superman 1. So enter Curtis Lind. Lind is a guy, he was like. He made his career doing shipping. He lived in a boat in and around where Ziz and her friends were living at sea. And they met each other through that. He like seldom them an anchor, but he's also like pushing 80. And so he's got. He's interested in like getting out of the boat life because it sucks. And he's got a plot of land that he. He's. He's got a house on and he's got extra space that he's interested in renting out. There's not like most. There's not like full houses, but there's like some shipping containers and I think like some rv, a busted RV or whatever. And he's got like some power and water hookups. Here's how his son Carl described what his father wanted to do with this place. He just wanted this as a place to let artists or woodworkers, electricians, to be able to come and live in a little trailer and have a container where they could work and put their tools and have a safe place. So again, depending on how you're looking, he's either trying to like, have a cheap space where like, you know, artists and the like can afford to like, survive and have little working spaces, or he's trying to be like a punk slum lord, Right?

[David Borie]

And I mean, the line is thin, right?

[Robert Evans]

The line is thin, right?

[David Borie]

The line is so, so thin.

[Robert Evans]

Speaking of a thin line, the sponsors of this podcast are the thin line keeping society safe from me not having enough money to live in a boat, you know, or this is why I have enough money live in a boat where I would go crazy.

[David Borie]

Or a box truck.

[Robert Evans]

Or a box truck. To live in a box. Box truck. The joy, the glory days. Yeah, we're back. We're talking about how good it is to live in a box truck. Good stuff.

[David Borie]

Do we know roughly how big the group is at this point?

[Robert Evans]

I think at any given time, there's between like six and nine people, you know?

[David Borie]

Okay, okay. So very small. Very small.

[Robert Evans]

Very small. Somewhere in that neighborhood, it fluctuates. And there's also, there's a bunch of people who are like, you could call it Zizians. They're in and out. They'll visit sometimes, or they even live in other states, but they're always in contact with multiple members of the group through the Internet. This is a very, like, geographically decentralized group. Although there is that, like, core inner circle who are all together on this land, and for a while, things are okay there. The Zizians pay rent. Ziz continues to write blog posts and run her followers through uni hemispheric sleep sessions to update grade them. And it's also important for me to note they don't ever call themselves Zizians. That name first comes up around this period of time, right after that disastrous protest when an anonymous rationalist publishes a paper called zizians.info that first identifies them as a cult and describes their uni hemispheric sleep tactics. And it's written because this person is in the community and wants to stop other people from falling in with Ziz. And I think they have good intentions here. They see the danger. They also, one of the issues with the document is I don't think they see some of the danger of other rationalist stuff.

[David Borie]

Yeah, right.

[Robert Evans]

This is like, why I say that. It's like a cultic substrate rather than being a pure cult, because there are people in it who can recognize stuff like this and try to provide a degree of accountability. Just like there are people who will report on and they hold Seafar's feet to the fire when people get accused of abuse. So the document alleges that Ziz had started telling her followers she was the. Basically, she's the only Double good or intrinsically good person there. And one of the only intrinsically good people on the planet. UHS sessions tended to reveal that other people in the community are just single good. And per Ziz's theories about the hero contract, they can only accomplish maximum good by feeding their energy and resources to the heroes. Ziz here's an example of the kind of things she sent people she saw in as single good. Saying you're single good is saying, help, I have a yerk in my head. Did you ever read Animorphs as a book, David? Wow.

[David Borie]

Yes.

[Robert Evans]

As a kid. That's what that's a reference to is those worms that control your brain. And that's another fiction, right? Yeah, yeah, that's. Yes, I know. Deep cut. Deep cut.

[Danny Shapiro]

Whoa.

[David Borie]

That unlocked a part of my brain that I have not used in forever.

[Robert Evans]

That's right. A bunch of people are now having the severance moment, but remembering every scholastic book fair they ever went to as a kid.

[David Borie]

Oh, man. All they gotta do is hit goosebumps and they.

[Robert Evans]

I know, I know. Oh, if only. So saying you're single good is saying, help. I have a yerk in my head that's a mirror image of me. I need you to surgically destroy it. Even if I'm then crippled for life or might die in the process. Then kill me if I ever do one evil act for the rest of my life. That's better than being a slave again. That's her role is surgically destroying the evil brains of her half brains of her followers. And then she has to be willing to murder them if anything bad, because if they ever do anything bad, then it means that the evil side could take over and it could do like mega bad and doom the world. Right.

[David Borie]

And she takes this on herself.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. And also, I mean, she's gonna have other people do the killing, basically. But like, yes, this is what she's saying is the stakes and this is how she sees her role within the community. Right. And I think at this point, that's pretty cold, leader. That's pretty cold leader.

[David Borie]

I think we've crossed over.

[Robert Evans]

I think we probably crossed that KT boundary. Right? Yeah. Yeah.

[David Borie]

Box trucks saying you gotta kill some people.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Saying you gotta murder people. Cause they're the devil. The yerk inside their brain. Yeah. Might be a little bit of cult weather. Feels like a cult outside. So some Zizians not implicated in any crimes have attacked this piece, this zizians.info thing as being inaccurate and basically a rationalist hit job. And again, there's some reason for suspicion here, but most of the claims made in it I have backed up through reading the issue. Individual like sources. One of the issues is that a lot, a lot of people writing about this will credit Ziz with all of the unihemispheric stuff. And that's mostly Gwyn. So there's a point worth making. Around this time, a woman named Jamie Zazko started living nearby with her girlfriend Alice Munday. Both are rationalists that are interested in Ziz's ideas. Alice and Ziz have been in contact for years and in fact Alice, because she's an older, more established rationalist, when Ziz was kind of new to the community, had sent Ziz an article on the Gervais Principle for the first time, which had spawned her ideas about needing to jailbreak people into psychopathy. And at varying times Ziz would claim Alice as a mentor. There are some, I don't like very vague accounts that Alice has done some problematic, abusive stuff in the community. I don't know true any of that is, but this is what people talk about. And I think Ziz may have had a break with her over some sort of disagreement because it. Look, it seems like from, from what I can tell, Jaime, who is dating Alice at the time, is in direct contact with Ziz and interested in her, but also is not communicating with Ziz under her real name. She is making a bunch of sock puppet accounts on her blog and she is specifically commenting and trying to engage Ziz in different conversations, pretending to be multiple different people, to quote unquote, sabotage the hold she believed another woman in the community, Emma Borhanian, had on Ziz. And Borhanian is that former Google engineer. Okay, so this is, you know, this is part of the messy thing is that like these people are all influencing each other and trying to like their kind of go to is like mind games to fuck with each other's heads.

[David Borie]

Yeah, not a lot of straight conversation, huh?

[Robert Evans]

No. Now Emma Borhanian, who Jamie alleges has like Jamie's girlfriend. No, Jamie's dating Alice Monday.

[David Borie]

Oh, I'm sorry.

[Robert Evans]

Borhanian is this former Google engineer who has been with Ziz since the rationalist fleet days. And Jamie thinks that she's controlling Ziz and she has like this bad influence that's leading them in a bad direction. And I've read Borhanian's blog too, because of course I had to. Emma is. She was as long winded as is fewer pop culture references. She wrote a lot about narrative narcissism but unlike most of these people, she tended to like, use a. Or she's like, I don't know. I don't understand the kind of point she's trying to make about narcissists, but she's very interested in the idea of, like, how narcissists work. Jamie didn't like Emma, and she claims that because Emma and another member of the community had started shit talking Alice to Ziz and convinced her that Alice was double evil. So Jamie creates all these sock puppet accounts to argue with Ziz with the goal of fucking with her head and making her distrust Emma. Quote, I adopted a variety of different Personas, many of whom claim to have beliefs I've never held or endorsed for the sake of determining how Ziz would react to these characters. So this isn't what and then what. Yes, exactly. There never seems to be a plan behind fuck with each other's mental health constantly. It's like, this is because there's all these overlapping fields of influence between all of these mostly women, and everyone is fucking with each other's heads up deliberately. And also constantly trying to hack and upgrade each other is basically Scientology in the form of a codependent friend group. Right? Like, that's what's happening here. This is so bad for everybody.

[David Borie]

It's just. Oh, man. It just. They just dig deeper and deeper and deeper.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, yes. Well, that's what happens again, if you don't. This is the, you know, the touch grasp has been turned online. People have some, as you said, some problematic ways of discussing it. But this is the importance of, like, turning out from your weird little sub subculture every now and again.

[David Borie]

And like, yes, definitely, because look at the world. How often are they interacting with the. The world, like, in general, very rarely.

[Robert Evans]

And most of the people they do interact with are like these other people who are kind of on the edge of dropping out of society, living on this guy's property, this 80 year old man. Yeah, that's property. And like.

[David Borie]

Who wants to?

[Robert Evans]

Those are their normies. Yeah. So while Jamie and Ziz are fighting online Covid hit, and with it comes that eviction moratorium in the state of California. So Ziz and her friends, they stop paying rent to Lind either because they're broke or just because they don't need to anymore. And more than a year goes by. In April of 2021, Ziz posts this to her blog. Housing in places like the Bay Area is a hierarchy of rent seekers and the rent seekers above landlords, rule by rule, surplus, selective enforcement Fear, uncertainty and doubt, corruption. It's all a complex and it makes landlords incredibly vulnerable to blackmail from someone who can do even a little bit of investigative work. It's bad praxis to pay them rent. So, again, I get it, I get it. But this is also going to lead you to a bad place. And this is where we get to divergent stories. Curtis Lind, the land landlord story is that he was very supportive of these people and of trans people in general. Taking one Zizian out to shop for her first bra. His friends and family say he was a decent guy. And I actually, when I started talking about writing these episodes on Blue sky, someone chimed in to say they had known him too, and that he was a nice person. I don't know. To Ziz, he was a landlord, and there are claims from the Zizians that he was verbally abusive and transphobic. By the end of 2021, after a year and a half of unpaid rent, Lind had started working on the process of having police evict them. He and other residents claimed that the Zissy had become aggressive, acting as if the property was theirs now, threatening other people, basically squatting on it and, like, being violent at times, including, like, throwing rocks at Lynn's cabin and brandishing knives at other people. So they're brandishing knives? Yeah, yeah. They have taken to, like, threateningly playing with knives while talking about how they will not leave the property or pay for rent. And you get the feeling like, I'm not. Again, I'm not against the idea that this, again, ambitious slumlord may have done some problematic things, but it sounds like the Zizians are being pretty deeply abusive to everyone around them.

[David Borie]

Right, right.

[Robert Evans]

Which is also, they believe is praxis is like these other people who are not. Who aren't double good and who aren't aware of the great work. They're not working towards the cause. They're Acausal is the term they use. Their lives don't really have value if you're not working for. For the cause. Ziz earlier will decide.

[David Borie]

It's not like they're doing outreach. Right. It's not like they're trying to convert their neighbors or anything like that.

[Robert Evans]

They're trying to convert rationalists, but they don't care about these weirdos living on the property with them. Right, right. And again, remember, like, Ziz had earlier decided that it would be worth four human lives for her to, like, get a. She would kill four people to get a shower before work. Right. Basically.

[David Borie]

Oh, with the ants, yes.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So these people don't have a lot of value for other people right now. The court case over the protest arrests dragged on, and In November of 2021, Ziz and her friends who'd been arrested filed a countersuit against Sonoma county as well as several individuals associated with Seafar and the venue. By the time 2022 starts, the pressure is on for Ziz and the people living with her to figure out what they're going to do next. They do, at some point work at a deal with Curtis while he'll give them a little more time to fix their RV if they promise to bounce a soon as possible. Ziz is no longer actively adding to her blog, but she's still responding to comments and communicating with other sympathetic rationalists regularly. She becomes much more focused in her writing in this period on vengeance, violence and death, as do others in her community. Per Wired quote, Lasota and others wrote a vengeance against the timeless decisions of others. If you truly irreconcilably disagree with someone's creative choice, I. E. Their choice extending arbitrarily far into the of pain, past and future, ultimately your only recourse is to kill them, one LaSota ally wrote in a long blog post citing Ziz's philosophies. In the comments, Lasoda wrote, I am so fucking glad to finally have an equal. Great stuff. In spring of 2021, one of the Rationalist Fleet veterans close to Ziz, Jay Winterford, who went by the name Fluttershy, killed themselves. They had Winterford had written about seeing Ziza's techniques as a way to deal with his child, childhood trauma and Lesotho wrote on her blog about her repeated attempts to fix and upgrade him. Now Ziz wrote about this this person and calls him a death knight. And as best as I can tell, a death knight is a Zizian term for someone who snaps and murders a bunch of people. She calls Hitler a death knight, but she also uses the term for mass shooters and she claims Winterford quote tried very hard to convince me and then us to join them in service of the goddess of of rape and death. Straight up declared intentions to kill us, did a bunch of horrible shit like said they were going to do even more horrible shit. I spent about seven months most of every day in a desperate and mutual mental battle trying to get in their head somehow understand this death drive thing I couldn't simulate in my own mind that made no sense and out predict them like all our lives in the world depended on it and basically this person's talking about doing like a mass shooting or some other terrorist attack against the rationalist community in Ziz's name. And Ziz claims that she's like, spends seven months trying to stop them from doing this and then finally they just kill themselves rather than killing anybody else. And again, they frame Ziz Frims as like their heroic battle to stop this person from murdering other people and damaging the cause. But like, I don't know, maybe, maybe like this person needed professional help when they started talking about wanting to do a massive. Wanting to murder a bunch of people, maybe they needed help. Like, not your help.

[David Borie]

I don't know if anyone needs Ziz's help.

[Robert Evans]

No, no, Ziz does not even need Ziz's help.

[David Borie]

No.

[Robert Evans]

And she weaves this person's death into this very, this messianic hero's journey for herself. Posting this in the summer of 2022. Since posting this, I have been tortured. Survived seven assassination attempts. Three more attempts to do me permanent bodily harm. Four people individually decided they had the sole rights to be my death love arch nemesis. As if they they'd be alone. Accidentally exposed myself to 1/100th of my hell and one committed suicide. Others utterly, utterly mentally cracked. No one knows what she's talking about with these assassination attempts. Someone may have given her a mean look at a grocery store and she decided, right, like that's the mind state spins out, right? Yeah. Rationalists who had declared Ziza cult leader considered all of this further evidence that she was dangerous. Again, rationalists also convince people to kill themselves. Be a logic traps, but like they're not wrong to point this out. Now, I brought up Jamie Zazzko and Alice Munday a little earlier. They had moved out of the bay in late 2020 and headed to Vermont, where Jamie, who had some family money, bought land and a gun. In February of 2022, she made a blog post with the subtitle I trolled Ziz and now she won wants to murder me. In it she claims she talks about how like, yeah, she made all these fake accounts. And in late 2021 she and Ziz finally start talking under their real names. And Ziz talks about these trolling messages from the fake accounts Jamie had made and like, said that they really fucked with her head. And so Jamie, who's starting to view Ziz as a friend, comes out and admits what she did. And Zyz responds by saying, the only way you can make this right is to murder your like, girlfriend, Ex girlfriend. It's a little unclear Alice Munday, my old mentor. Like, you have to kill this person for me. Order to make this right. Here's what Jamie writes. During her last phone call, Ziz informed me that the only way I could gain her trust and make up for what I did was to murder Alice, preferably sometime soon. Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor and that I might destroy the body with lye. And then told me that after I should video call Ziz and show her the body before I destroy it so she could get proof positive that I'd really done it. And. And if I didn't do it, Ziz plan to drive across the entire, entire continental United States to murder me. Great.

[David Borie]

The die is cast.

[Robert Evans]

The die is cast now.

[David Borie]

Shit.

[Robert Evans]

Jamie says that Ziz wants Alice dead because she thinks Alice is a mentor and she's got this whole Sith thing going on. So she's like, guess what? The Sith always kill their mentor. So I have to kill Alice or I can't get powerful enough to. To save the world. Great.

[David Borie]

It's crazy.

[Robert Evans]

I love philosophy.

[David Borie]

It's a story that has escalated so crazy it is wild to hear it. Where it's like, okay, this is where it starts. The wheels start to really fall off.

[Robert Evans]

This is where that Border Patrol officer's death becomes inevitable.

[David Borie]

Yeah. Cause now you feel like Ziz has backed herself into a corner where someone's going to die.

[Robert Evans]

Yes. Somewhat.

[David Borie]

Like they're talking about it. You're threatening it. Seriously, you're telling, like at this point, right. Is someone.

[Robert Evans]

This is going to happen at this point. If no outside power comes in to disrupt these thought chains and decision chains, someone is going to die. And no one does come in. Right. And several people die.

[David Borie]

I mean, how could someone rationally even.

[Robert Evans]

How could a rational.

[David Borie]

I could say irrational.

[Robert Evans]

Right.

[David Borie]

How could someone even get there? How could you think about, like, it's so insular.

[Robert Evans]

You think about something like you, 5150 this Fluttershy person. Right. Or 5150 Zyzz. Does that make it better? Probably not. Probably just makes them even more paranoid and angry and convinced to do violence.

[David Borie]

It becomes the 11th assassination attempt or whatever. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know how you fix this at this point.

[David Borie]

No, No. I think it might be too far gone.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. I'm sure there's some possible way that this could have been fixed, but it's not clear. Clear to me.

[David Borie]

And who.

[Robert Evans]

Who would be the person who does it? Right.

[David Borie]

Who would be the person to do it.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe get George Lucas in there. George. Yes.

[David Borie]

Oh, my God, that's so some ladies.

[Robert Evans]

Have taken your movies way too seriously. We need you to fly out and talk them out of committing murders.

[David Borie]

This is gonna sound crazy. There's a bunch of people in a box truck wanting to kill in your name. Or Ricky Gervais you can call.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, Ricky Gervais. Get Ricky Gervais and George Lucas on a fucking chopper. Get him in here on a Blackhawk. They gotta talk these people down.

[David Borie]

Oh, oh.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man. It's so funny. Just a week later, George Lucas is completely in the cult. He's wearing all black. He's living. Oh, no. Oh, no.

[David Borie]

So he's writing. It's not even fan fiction. He's writing canonical Star Wars.

[Robert Evans]

He's writing canonical, canonical Star wars stuff.

[David Borie]

Coming up. Canonical, rational Star Wars.

[Robert Evans]

Ponder that. And ponder these ads, my friends. We'll be back with more. So we're back now. Jamie is one of the few people who is, like, as good at manipulating Ziz as Ziz is at other people in this community. And after Ziz is like, hey, look, very high mana. Ziz is like, look, I'll have to kill you if you don't kill Alice. You know? And you know, I'll do it. Because it's a timeless decision. Jamie counters in a very effective way by saying, like, making a blog post saying, ziz said all this. I am not suicidal if I die, it's her. And also letting Ziz know, quote, I have friends who will avenge me. Murdering Alice or me now is tantamount. Tantamount to committing suicide by proxy. So they have this, like, checkmate count corner checkmate chess match in blog posts that gets interrupted in March when Gwyn fakes her death, probably to escape the litigation. They're all back.

[David Borie]

Oh, yeah, Gwyn, get out of here.

[Robert Evans]

Gwyn does make the good decision. Cause sometime after faking her death, she bounces from this whole community. She does get out of there.

[Danny Shapiro]

Okay.

[Sophie Lichterman]

There was just no way this story was gonna end without somebody faking their own death.

[Robert Evans]

Sophie, so excited for you. This story doesn't even end. This story, like late middles with two death fakings. Because In September of 2022, Ziz fakes her death in a boating accident on the black signet. Emma calls the cops, says that she fell overboard. The Coast Guard, they work so hard to try to find her and save her that they get fatigue waivers so they can work all night. But they find nothing because she's not dead.

[David Borie]

This Is how on the the black singer.

[Robert Evans]

I don't know where she actually was, but she doesn't. She's not dead. She's not dead. Ziz is declared dead and her of her family prints an obituary. Like Gwyn's death faking is a little less successful. Like their lawyer in court after they come in with legal evidence that Ziz is dead. Gwyn's lawyer here is like I really don't think they're dead. I think they're faking it.

[David Borie]

Oh, oh, her man.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Wow, what a snitch ass lawyer.

[Robert Evans]

These lawyers don't like them and they don't like their lawyers.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Well now that's where they up. You can't. Your lawyer has to ride for you.

[Robert Evans]

That, that. Look, Elron Hub knew this about having a.

[David Borie]

Who's writing for this? Who even who knows what the they're talking about.

[Robert Evans]

How do you even talk with these people at this point asking for counsel.

[David Borie]

Oh, here's what's going on.

[Robert Evans]

The sanest decision one of them has made is to fake their death.

[David Borie]

Honestly, maybe we need more lawyers in this story.

[Robert Evans]

Maybe they could have seen it. Maybe a couple of lawyers digital could have fixed this. So I don't know. Precisely. Also they have lawyer money. No, these are public defenders.

[David Borie]

Oh, okay.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. So Gwyn clearly fakes their death just to clear themselves of their legal problems. I think Ziz this does it for that. But also she and her closest friends are now plotting the murder of Curtis Lynde. We don't really. Yeah, that's the landlord.

[David Borie]

Now they want to kill Curtis.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, they want to kill Curtis.

[David Borie]

They want to stay on the land. Is that the kind of the thought?

[Robert Evans]

I think they want to stay on the land. I think they also their escalation logic is that if he is having the cops evict us, that is a situation that could end in our death. So he's trying to murder us. So the logical thing for us to do is to kill him now to protect us both from him and, and.

[David Borie]

From other people and then have sex with his body.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think they're going to do that, but they are at least aware of that as an option. Yeah. So the reality of what happens next is a little bit in dispute. But what no one disagrees is that on November 13, 2022, this is like right after midnight, Curtis Lynde is stabbed repeatedly and impaled with a samurai sword. He also during the same altercation shoots and kills Emma Borhanian and wounds another member of the group in one tumblr post a Zizian with the username A flower by another name gives what I think is probably a representative example of how the Zizians want to depict what happened next. What happened here, Kurt? Quote, Curtis Lind and his ex CIA best friend Patrick McMillan spent months threatening Emma and her friends. Unlike what the papers claim, Emma and her friends weren't squatters. They were tenants who were struggling to find jobs or a place they that would lease to them after Myrick and Sefar called a SWAT team on them in 2019. Now, I don't know if Macmillan was in the CIA and I don't know if he and Curtis threatened these ladies, but I will say the preponderance of evidence suggests they were in fact squatting. This account blames them on not being able to make rent on their legal bills, but by this point they had been squatting for like two years and change.

[David Borie]

Right?

[Robert Evans]

I don't know if Lind was transphobic. I don't know, you know, if he. They say he alienated them from their neighbors by telling them that they were in a cult. I don't know if that's true or if they alienated their neighbors neighbors by being very off putting and aggressive. This Zizian account claims that other individuals started threatening to call the cops on the Zizians and thus, quote, it was an unending nightmare for them of terrifying, insane threats from every corner. Now, the author of this document says they weren't there themselves, but believes heard like other members of the community explain what happened. And they said that Lind made specific threats in the fall of 2022 which culminated in one member of the group buying a bulletproof vest and wearing it at all times. I don't trust this account. And among other things, it lies about the nature of their living situation. It lies by saying Emma had filed paperwork to take Curtis to court over the eviction. There was no court thing filed here. There's a very good comprehensive source on this by an individual who goes by kinthecowboy on Twitter and he notes in this timeline of events the last sentence is not true. There's no record of any lawsuit being filed in 2022 with any of the Zizians as plaintiffs and with Curtis Lind as a defendant. So they claim basically this guy was aggressive and threatening us and one day he attacked us. Right? Quote, he just, that morning he decided to stop them. He walked all the way from his trailer to their trucks while they were packing their things and opened fire. Lynn shot Emma point blank through her Heart and lung. She collapsed to the ground and immediately her lung began filling with her heart's blood. She died within 20 seconds, violently coughing up chunks of of her lung tissue in a futile attempt to clear her airways. Somnib was shot six times, rushing in a futile attempt to save Emma's life. The vest saved her life, but she was still hit through the neck and stomach. She acted only in self defense. That's the Zizian claim here, that he just walks in as they're getting ready to leave and starts shooting them, right?

[David Borie]

Yeah. That's stupid now.

[Robert Evans]

That's their claim. This leaves out a very important fact, which is that Curtis Lind is stabbed 50 times. 50, yes. Lyn's account is somewhat less sympathetic to these people. He claims that after getting successfully getting a judgment against them in a court, he moved to evict. And the sheriff agreed to do an eviction on November 15th. And this is what Lyn later said, quote. So they're worried about where they were going to go and what they were going to do. And they had a meeting with me and the meeting was about them staying for another two months and not paying. I said, no, I can't do that. So one of them took out a knife, it was a folding knife, it was a fairly large folding knife. And started patting the blade in in their hand like this and looking at me and smiling. And they don't specify who this was. I don't know like you know entirely like which person he's accusing here or, or whatever. But he says this is how his account of like the attack itself is that after this, after he gets threatened with a knife, he goes and he buys a pistol and he gets a license, license to carry. And then right before the sheriffs are supposed to show up to evict them, one of the Zizians named Suri shows up and she tries to get him to like come help turn the water off in her trailer. So he goes over to there to turn the water off and as he bends over to do that, he gets hit with something that shatters the right side of his skull, quote. And the next thing I remember is standing up with three of them right next to me, you know, or around me. And I was bleeding from numerous puncture wounds. I think around 50. I couldn't see out of my right eye, had been punctured three times. The back of my neck had some severe cuts like someone was trying to cut my head off. You know, I had no idea what was happening or when this had all happened. I was completely gone while this was happening. And how I stood back up or got to that spot, I have no idea. But I looked at all the blood coming out of me. Oh, and I had a sword, a long sword, all the way through my chest, right next to my heart, sticking out the other end, which I went to the hospital with. I was afraid to take it out. But anyway, at that time I pulled out my pistol and started shooting. I killed the person to my right. And I gotta say, based on the physical evidence, I think Lyn's account is the real one of what happens here. I think they ambush him and stab him repeatedly and he shoots and kills one in self defense. Obvious. Like again, he has a samurai sword entirely through his back.

[David Borie]

Can we acknowledge that this man took 50 to the chest and a samurai sword? Yeah, they don't make him like that anymore.

[Robert Evans]

And it's one of the, those, one of the like doubting claims by the Zizians is that like he couldn't survive being stabbed this many times. People survive getting stabbed a crazy amount of times all the time. It's all like, if you read about enough stabbing accounts, you will read about people who die because they get stabbed once and you will read about people who live through getting like 70 stab wounds. It's nuts. Stabbings are very hard to predict.

[David Borie]

Tricky, tricky. It's also so worrisome because now they've done it. Right. They've crossed that line.

[Robert Evans]

They've crossed that line and one of them has died, right?

[David Borie]

Yes. So the stakes are as high as they had always thought that they were.

[Robert Evans]

And when the box chucks are cleaned out after they get arrested, the ones who had carried out the attack, because Ziz is on the property and I think Gwyn is too still at this point. But Ziz does not participate in the attack. And like cops recognize Ziz and know that she's faking her death and don't arrest her. Which is one of like the weird things.

[David Borie]

They're familiar enough to know that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I think this is that because they've been called before because of these people. Yeah, I think they're aware of who she is, but just don't do. Even after this mass stabbing shooting, again, the cops just don't do their jobs. Also as part of this story, you know, it's also worth noting that when they, this after this arrest, when like their box trucks are being cleaned out, they find tubes, containers of lye, which, you know, Ziz had talked to Jaime about dissolving bodies in lye. That's probably what the plan was with Curtis. My guess is that's certainly what Curtis gets convinced of. Now my thinking and I can't this is not proven. I'm sure courts will try. We'll see how well they are able to do this in a court. My suspicion is that Ziz orchestrated this attack and convinced her friends to do it, or convince them to convince themselves to do it and justified it using the same escalatory logic that they used on everything else. On her blog when discussing theoretical acts of deadly violence, Ziz referred to what she called Quirrell's algorithm from the Harry Potter rationalist fan that these people all love. And she quoted this line from the book describing the mental state she believed was necessary to survive a life threatening situation. Intent to kill. Think pure purely of killing. Grasp at any means to do so. Censors off. Do not flinch. Kill again. This Harry Potter book really goes all.

[David Borie]

The way back to that.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. Be careful what you write authors. You might get someone impaled by a samurai sword.

[David Borie]

Of course they had a samurai sword.

[Robert Evans]

Of course they had a samurai sword. I'm sure they bought them all from the Bud k catalog. So Zyz had also written in late 2021 in a comment on her blog, I get so many people lining up to commit suicide by zyzz and then she hyperlinks to the wiki for suicide by cop and her meaning is that anyone acting in a way to like harm her or her goals is killing themselves because she has to kill them now. Right. And there's there's a good medium post by someone named Sefa Shapiro that traces around how this time. How around this time Ziza's online writing becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea of using deadly viol make oneself less vulnerable. Right. That you again, you have to always be ready to kill in order to protect yourself. So the police arrest two of her friends, Somni and Suri Dao, who are the two surviving Zizians who'd taken part in the attack and they take them to jail. Per a California law, these two are not just charged with trying to kill Curtis, but with the murder of their friend Emma. It's like if you know, three people rob a liquor store and one of them kills someone, the other two will get charged with murder because someone dies in the commission of a crime that they were involved in. Right. This is California state law. A lot of people get life sentences as a result of this. Usually not in this exact scenario, but known usually not. Somni was placed in a men's jail and complained Dao, after being assigned to a women's jail, demanded a men's jail. I think this is because they were trying to, like, make a case that they weren't in their right mind. But it's kind of unclear to me exactly why this happens. There's a lot in terms of these two and their interactions with the court system that I. I'm not gonna get into, right, because it. It's. It's just we. We simply can't go down all of those rabbit holes. But you should know that, like, the, like, this is a. A factor in everyone's thinking is, like, their two friends are in prison. They're constantly sending these letters to the judge. They're, like, making these, like, weird rationalist arguments in their court cases. And, like, that's all going down while Ziz and the remainder of her inner circle kind of go on the run, right? Because, you know, now they've been involved in a murder.

[David Borie]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

Gwyn seems to go. Go fully into hiding at this time. I don't know if that's because of the murder or just because she had finally had enough of Ziz and all of her talk about killing. But in any case, she goes to ground around this point now, while all this is going on. I hate to keep bringing in new people, but there's a bunch of them.

[David Borie]

There's so much of them.

[Robert Evans]

Jamie up in Vermont, I think, is continuing to. Is seeing Alice Monday anymore. Alice seems to have also made the wise decision to fucking bounce and go to ground. Jamie is living with another ZIZ follower named Daniel Blank up in Vermont at this point. And Jamie has gotten increasingly into Ziz's ideas. Blank is one of the people we know. He delivers several documents to the court on Somni's behalf during this whole, like, after they go get charged with murder. And he's like, a guy who has, like, a job and, you know, stuff going on in his life. And then like, a movie month after this shooting, stabbing, he drops out of society, cuts ties with his family, and quits his job to go live with Jamie. And, like, it's kind of a little unclear of exactly what's happening, but my belief is basically Jaime and the people who are around her who are up in Vermont, who are Zizians, are being before Ziz gets there, told to prepare for Ziz because they want to get access to money and a private property, a compound, right, where they can both not be on the run, have a living space, and continue to work on their ideas. That is what I think is happening. And Daniel Blank is someone who has been following Zyzz online, gets convinced to drop out of his life, cut ties with everybody, move in with this person Jamie. And it looks like they're kind of working to, like, ready a situation for Ziz and the Zizians in Vermont. And again, there's a lot of this that has not been litigated yet. But what we know is that on December 31, 2020, 22, Jamie Zazko's parents, who were 72 and 69 respectively, are murdered in their home.

[David Borie]

Oh, my God. On the property in Vermont.

[Robert Evans]

They. No, they live in a separate state. They live in Pennsylvania. Right, okay. But we don't know who committed this murder. No one has yet been charged for it. Unlike in the Lynn stabbing, we do not have an obvious explanation. There is a ring video that shows an unknown vehicle pulling into the driveway, followed by suddenly screams. Some investigators think they hear someone yell mom. Before another person yells, oh, my God. Oh, my God. But other people who have viewed the recording say it's unclear if that first word is mom. I have not seen this recording, so I can't tell you what's accurate. But Zazko's parents were worth several million dollars and had a sizable estate to inherit.

[David Borie]

Yeah. You said that she had bought the property initially off of family money.

[Robert Evans]

Right, Right. She's got some amount of access. Access to it. Right. And her last, right before these people are murdered, Jamie's mom. Messages with Jamie earlier that same day about savings bonds that Zazzko is due to receive. In blog posts from 2021, Zashko had written about her parents and repeatedly accused them of being abusers. One specific accusation she makes is that they snuck meat into her food and forced her to eat it after she expressed a desire to go vegan. So she has talked extensively online about her parents being fundamentally evil people. We know that at this point, she lives with Daniel Blank and that their phones go dark right around the time of the murder, as if they had, like, placed them in a Faraday bag, basically. Okay. Right. But we don't know where they are on the day of the murder. Police visit them in Vermont shortly after the murder. Because obviously, the daughter is someone that you're going to think of as a potential. Because one of the things about the murder is that whoever did it had some degree of knowledge of the property and an ability to get on it without forcing an entry. Right. So obviously the cops, they're gonna think, who's the next of kin? Right.

[Danny Shapiro]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

So police visit them on their property in Vermont and talk to Blank and Jamie. Jamie, they ask if she has a gun. Jamie says yes. And she shows them a handgun that she owns that is the same caliber as the one used in the shootings. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean much. It's a 9 millimeter ton of 9 millimeter. Right. There's one thing the cops will point out is that Zazko owned the same type of bullet, the same make of bu as those used in the shooting. But again, like I, the bullets I use keeping my carry gun are hydroshocks, which is like what cops get because that's the safest thing in court. If you're in a defensive shooting, you want to be like, I have the same bullets the cops have. Right. Because someone can't. You don't want to have like the man shredder, zombie rounds or some shit. So the fact that like a common defensive caliber would murder these people was in the gun. That's not a smoking gun, if you'll forgive it. But it also is like, it's not nothing either. Right. Like that's not nothing.

[David Borie]

Right.

[Robert Evans]

What means more is that Jamie is now the full beneficiary of her parents estate. And while she has not been charged, an attorney for Pennsylvania has filed a potential slayer statute issue, which is a law in Pennsylvania that you can't inherit someone's stuff if you kill them. Right. But again, the. They haven't been charged. There's a lot of suspicious shit about this. She also lies to her relatives, claiming she couldn't have driven to Pennsylvania from Vermont because she didn't have a working car, and we know she did.

[David Borie]

So, you know, yeah, it's, it's very suspicious over here.

[Robert Evans]

I don't think it's unlikely that she may have been basically tasked with killing her parents to get access to her money for the cause. Their money for the the cause. Right. That's kind of my suspicion, you know, and she was partly told it was okay because they were abusive. And so like, you maybe have to do this in order to protect yourself and other people from abusers, which is the kind of logic they have too. On January 13th, right after midnight, Pennsylvania state troopers raid a hotel near the Philadelphia airport where Blank and Zazzko are staying. A Vermont judge had issued a warrant for their home, but police had not found the gun they believe was the murder weapon. They touch that weapon when they're in Vermont, but they don't have a warrant for it. Right. So they don't get to take it. Zazka was Detained and the only one. And would have been the only one detained if she hadn't shouted to hotel staff as they're taking her away, tell Daniel in room 111, I'm being arrested. So that. Damn. Smooth, smooth. These rationalists and their brilliant crimes. The cops obviously get interested in this, and they recognize Daniel's name, and they find on surveillance footage that she has handed a bag to him outside of his room in the night before. Right. And they recognize his name because they visited Zazhko and Blank in their Vermont home. So they get a warrant for his hotel room and raid it. Like, an hour or two later, Blank is found in the bathroom next to a blonde person dressed in black. This is Zyzz, so. Oh, right, yeah. An article by the San Francisco Chronicle explains what happened next. Blank put his hands behind his back and walked out of the room, obeying police commands. But Ziz did not do any of that. He had his eyes closed. A trooper testified, using masculine pronouns. He would not speak. He was just laying almost unconscious, or as if he was dead on the ground. He had to be carried out. And again, this is misgendered. I don't know if it's intentional or if Ziz was, like, acting and portraying themselves as masculine because they're on the run. You know, at this point in time, it's not actually clear to me. Whatever the case, Ziz is taken into custody and charged with disorderly conduct and interfering with a police investigation. A 9 millimeter handgun was found in the room along with ammo. $40,000 in cash is found in Zashko Subaru. And again, she doesn't get charged with murder. They let her out very soon, and she just leaves the cops. Cops are shocked because they have to give her back her car and the 40 grand which she abandons. She and Blake just leave the car and $40,000 in cash. I don't think they're making good decisions at this point. Is my only explanation for you, David, how? Maybe they're thinking like, well, they put a tracker in the money. They'll track the car. It's not safe to have any of it. I don't know why they're making this decision, but it's very weird right now. During this same time, several other Zizians are at least suspected to have been coming in and out of, like, Pennsylvania during the area around the murder. It is unclear how many people, if they were. If the Zizians killed this husband and wife, it's unclear how many of them were there. And again, no one has been charged. But it's at this point that another Zizian enters the playing field. This person goes by the name Ophelia. They are a German citizen. They have, like, a legal residency in the US Their last name is Bockholt. They used to work at James street or Jane street, which is where Sam Bankman Fried worked. They were quant trader. Right. So this is someone functioning at a high level of the finance industry who, like, drops out of their career and life to go to Vermont. Hours, like, really, like, they fly in, like, right before the murders.

[David Borie]

That's such a troubling theme about this whole thing, about how many of these people really do integrate in a major way. It's not just fringe people.

[Robert Evans]

No. These are people who are successful in their other lives, but they're lacking. I think a lot of this is just that desperation that is also core to fascism's appeal, to feel a sense of heroism, like, I am part of a heroic struggle. People are very vulnerable to that. And even if you're making the money, if you're succeeding at a tech company company, you're in finance. But it all feels empty to you because it kind of is. If someone's like, you can save the cosmos.

[David Borie]

Yeah, here's the cause.

[Robert Evans]

You'll give up your whole life in order to do that. Right? Yeah. So Blank and Zazko are released in short order. As I said, they get out of jail quickly, but Ziz stays in custody for a while. And Baylis said, I think at 50,000 initially.

[David Borie]

Are they aware of the fake death and everything?

[Danny Shapiro]

It's.

[Robert Evans]

Yes, they are. Where she has faked her death. California shows no interest in sending police out to get her, which is like, it is a crime. This is the bail is set very high for two misdemeanors. And police justify it in, like the court documents by saying Ziz had recklessly created a dangerous situation by making the police move her, per that argument. That article in Wired, quote, behind these arguments and even the charges themselves, a deeper motive. Unable to charge for the Zazko murders, but suspecting that Lasota, Michelle Zazko, that's Jamie and Danielle Blank could be. And Daniel Blank could be tied to them. Prosecutors were trying desperately to hold Lesoto while the police gathered evidence. Obviously, you realize we don't give a shit about this case. One local official familiar with it told me what they were interested in was Lesoda's involvement in the homicide. So the authorities here have recognized this is all centered around this person. But it's visible difficult for us to hold Them legally responsible at this stage. We can't even arrest anyone for the murder yet. We don't have enough. And you know, it's. I'm not gonna again pretend to know precisely what happened, but I think it's pretty clear Ziz probably gave the order to do this killing or everyone using her logic talked themselves into. Well, this is the only way to further. Further our crucially important work is we need the money that these abusers are selfishly keeping to themselves. Ziz's bail is eventually reduced. She winds up in the wind immediately. Like the, the authorities are like, she's got to immediately bounce and we'll lose her. And that's exactly what happens. Zhashko and Blank. It's kind of unclear exactly what they do initially after this, but we know Jaime reaches out to her aunt and begs for help and her aunt is like, did you kill my sister? And Jamie says no and blames the murders on less wrong, which is Elizur's like blog. So she's blaming the rationalist community. She claims that she's being targeted and that like Seafar had commit murdered her parents to like basically make Ziz look bad. A year or so goes by, right? Ziz misses a court date, she never shows back up. We really don't know what the fuck these people are doing right. From most of this period. In February of 2023, she's no longer blogging either. She's not? No, no, no, no, no, no. But she's.

[David Borie]

When you said she had stopped, she was just responding to people.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. And she is communicating with people still, but I think it's primarily through more like direct means. In February of 2023, a community alert is posted by someone named Sepha Shapiro. It warns that quote. Over the past few years, Ziz has repeatedly called for the deaths of many different classes of people. And this, this post lays out a lot of what I've described in these episodes. But there's still no public awareness of the Zizians. Everything happening here is so weird. The circumstances around, around the murders are so murky that like most law enforcement kind of shrugs it off. And there's not like a public. These people are so fringe, it's very difficult to even talk about them. Right.

[David Borie]

Yeah. How do you qualify that on the nightly news?

[Robert Evans]

Yes, exactly.

[David Borie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

This is all going to change. In February of 2020 24, Jamie Zazko purchases three handguns, I think from a Vermont gun store. A few months later, In May of 2024, a 20 year old woman named Teresa Youngblood disappears from her home in Seattle. Youngblood is one of a scat, one of the scattered community of people who still obsessively followed and interacted with Ziz and her inner circle's teachings. Her parents feared that she was in a controlling relationship with someone, and months after disappearing, she applies to for a marriage license with another rationalist who's obsessed with Ziz named Maximilian Snyder. Now, like most Zizians, Snyder has a very impressive academic record. He was a National Merit scholar who attended Oxford University. Then he starts posting on Less Wrong. Like all the others, he is initially a fan of Yudkowski, but at some point, he gets convinced that Ziz's vegan Sith radicalism is the true path. In the summer of 2023, just months earlier, he won $11,000 from an AI alone alignment contest. And he won that award under his legal name, but he also goes by Adir. It's kind of unclear to me what the situation is there. Around the same time he tried to raise money for Ziz when she was briefly behind bars. I don't know if this guy Snyder, this person, if Snyder marries Youngblood because they're actually in love. They had gone to high school together, but I think there may have been some sort of weird legal reason that Ziz wanted them married. Again, very unclear, but they don't stay together together physically very long. By January of 2025, Teresa is in Vermont looking at rural properties for purchase alongside Ophelia, the German quant trader. Right. Well, Max Snyder is in, like, California and reading between some lines. I think because Ophelia and Teresa aren't involved in any of the court cases, Ziz is using them to help actually scout out and find an isolated compound which where they can hide out. Right. Like, they are doing the groundwork of figuring out a place for them to live. They are acting as the legal individuals who can kind of handle everything for the folks who are legally compromised. Later investigation would show that Bockholt and Youngblood had been living in Chapel Hill, Vermont, in a duplex. And neighbors say that several other people also lived with them. These people were always dressed in black and owned a box truck. It is unclear, but I think what happens is after she goes on the run, Ziz starts reaching out to people she'd been in contact with around the world and says, hey, the time is now. Drop out of your lives and come devote yourselves to the cause. Right.

[David Borie]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

And then these, these three are the ones who follow Bockholt, Youngblood and Snyder. Right. Because they all Cut ties with their families, cut, you know, with their jobs, and leave home around the same time. While they're looking for rural compounds, Bockholt and Youngblood wind up in a hotel in Lindenville, Vermont. An employee reports them to the police because they're wearing body armor and other tactical gear, and at least one of them is openly carrying a pistol. Something is very weird here because they're approached not just by Virginia State Police, but by a Homeland Security investigations officer. And there's evidence that Homeland Security spends like a week, is surveilling them for like a week before the shootout that happens. I don't know what Homeland Security thought was happening. They may have just seen we're on the border. Obviously, shit's escalated there. This is an. A foreign citizen with an American citizen. They're wrapping their electronics in tinfoil. They've got guns, they're driving around being very suspicious. Syndactical gear. Maybe they just thought it was like some run of the mill terrorism bullshit.

[David Borie]

It's worth checking out.

[Robert Evans]

Right? So they are surveilling these people, and I think Youngblood and Bockholt realize they're being surveilled. Right? And that starts that escalatory loop in their head of Zizzian logic where, well, if the police confront me, there's only one way to respond, right?

[David Borie]

Fuck yeah. Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Two days later, prosecutors in California ask the judge in the Curtis Lynd case to speed up the process of going to trial. He's in his 80s, he's got a bad memory, and he's the only witness of the attack. So they say it's necessary. Like, we need to do this quickly. So the next day, January 17, before this can happen, before Lynd can go to trial, a masked assailant assaults Lind near his property and slits his throat, killing him. Maximilian Snyder, Youngblood's husband, will be arrested days later in Red and Kennedy, California, for the murder.

[Danny Shapiro]

Fuck.

[David Borie]

Because they had been separate.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, man.

[David Borie]

So there's like. There's a possibility that Zizid sent.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah. After the. I don't see what now. He did not. He hasn't pled yet, at least as of the time we record this. But he sent a letter in jail to Leisure Yudkowski trying to make him become a vegan. He also. Priorities in order.

[Danny Shapiro]

Oh.

[Robert Evans]

He also claimed, I am not one of Ziz's friends. Neither she nor her friends endorse me or my words. So far as I know. I speak only for myself, as myself, for the sake of everyone. Sure. Yeah.

[David Borie]

Okay.

[Robert Evans]

Okay, man. You just decided to kill this guy for no reason. Oh, man.

[David Borie]

This guy who happened to happen to have a relationship with this very small.

[Robert Evans]

Group of people who is his. This person, he has filed for a marriage license with Youngblood. The day after Lind gets assassinated, Youngblood and Bockholt are heading back from a trip out target shooting, when they get pulled over by border patrol. Youngblood almost immediately draws her sidearm. There's a shootout. She kill, or I think she kills. Now, anytime there's a shootout and an officer dies a decent amount of the time, that officer is, like, killed by another cop's bullet. I don't actually know for sure if it was Youngblood or if they all start shooting and he just gets killed in the crossfire. I don't fully know whose gun kills him, but she definitely starts shooting. Right, Right. And border patrol agent David Mallon dies. Bockholt is killed in the immediate shootout before she can draw a weapon. And both of the firearms used in this shooting were guns purchased by Zadji by Jamie in early 2020 24. Right. So again, all of these things are. It's very easy to connect them if you, like, know all these people take so long to trace out.

[David Borie]

For all their talk of murder, the. In practice, they're not very good at it, huh?

[Robert Evans]

No, I guess they. I mean, they didn't plan for this shooting to happen. Right. It's just that their kind of escalatory logic made it inevitable. After all this, authorities finally start putting the whole story together. A manhunt is law launched. And on February 16th of 2025, Zyzz, Jamie and Daniel Blank are finally caught. After the shootout, they seem to have started living in box trucks again. One of which was registered to Youngblood. Yeah, back to what you know. And again, one of these is Youngblood. Like, the box truck is registered in her name. They pulled onto a property in Frostburg to camp, and the owner, like, spotted them and said, hey, get off my land. And, like, Ziz tries to talk this person into letting them stay for a month, but he's like, no, I'm to call the cops.

[David Borie]

You're in a robe. You're in a wizard's robe.

[Robert Evans]

You look like a wizard. I don't need any of this. Ultimately, they all get arrested and charged with everything the cops could throw at them, which is like, illegal possession, carrying a firearm, stuff like that. Right. Inside the other box truck, state troopers found Jamie and Ziz, according to the the charging documents, dressed all in black and wearing Gun belts with ammunition. So, yeah. And that's the situation where we are.

[David Borie]

That's it.

[Robert Evans]

The story's done. No. Oh, man. Yeah. So this is basically where we are. ZYZ asked for pretrial release. Didn't get it.

[Danny Shapiro]

No.

[Robert Evans]

Not shocked about that. Quote speaking. And this is from a Seattle PI Article. Speaking haltingly. She also requested a vegan diet and said that she was in a mild state of delirium due to lack of food. I have not done anything wrong, she told a judge. I might starve to death if you do not intervene. I need the jail to be ordered to have a vegan diet. It's more important than whatever this hearing is. So I don't think this whole court process is going to end super well for Z. No. But I also, it's very hard to tell, like, what are you. What are you going to charge? Like, I. I don't like, I'm. I'm legitimately like, very, like, I. I'll be fascinated to see what the charges are here.

[David Borie]

Yeah, it's exciting to know that this. We can see this play out real time.

[Robert Evans]

I. Yeah, this was weird.

[David Borie]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah.

[David Borie]

Hell yeah, it was.

[Robert Evans]

Hell yeah, it was great.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Anyway, like, I would like to know how things fucking shake up.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, maybe we'll revisit this when my brain has healed. I need to go read about Hitler some to calm down.

[David Borie]

Yeah, you need to go talk to your neighbor.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, I need to go talk to my neighbor.

[Sophie Lichterman]

That's a better suggestion.

[Robert Evans]

Thank you, David.

[Danny Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Robert Evans]

Not just keep reading my Hitler books and coming up with theories.

[David Borie]

That's how you get double bad.

[Robert Evans]

That's how you get double bad. Exactly.

[David Borie]

That's how it happens, buddy.

[Sophie Lichterman]

You gotta go on a run, go talk to your neighbor. Go pet a goat, you know, everyone else.

[Robert Evans]

Go talk to somebody, you know, pet an animal, walk, you know, in the woods or something.

[David Borie]

Maybe stay away from boats for a while.

[Robert Evans]

Just stay the fuck away from boats. Don't go live on a boat. Don't go live on a boat. Stay out of the water. I don't care how bad it rent is, stay out of the fucking water.

[David Borie]

Oh, man.

[Robert Evans]

Fuck. God.

[Danny Shapiro]

Wow.

[Robert Evans]

How do you feel at the end of this, David?

[Danny Shapiro]

Yeah.

[Sophie Lichterman]

David, how are you doing? This is your first experience on our show. What's up? How's the vibe?

[David Borie]

I honestly don't know. To tell you the truth. I don't know how I feel. I'm gonna have to really gonna have to kick this around for a couple days, but this was interesting. Yeah, interesting as hell.

[Robert Evans]

Yeah, that's one way to describe it. That's one way to describe it. This is a wild time.

[Sophie Lichterman]

David, do you have anything you want to plug for the listeners?

[David Borie]

Oh, yeah, I. I produced my own comedy special. It's available on my Patreon. Patreon.com davidbore G, B, O, R, I, E. It's called Birth of a Nation, spelled with a G because that's my last name and I think it's funny. But yeah, check that out. I have a podcast. My mama told me. I also have one called All Fantasy Everything where we draft fantasy things that aren't sports. But yeah, check that stuff out.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Yes, that sounds really cool.

[David Borie]

It's a lot of fun.

[Robert Evans]

That sounds so much better for you than everything we've talked about.

[David Borie]

It's different than this.

[Robert Evans]

It's different than this.

[Sophie Lichterman]

And it reminded me I need to. I need to set my fantasy basketball lineup. So thank you, sir.

[Robert Evans]

Oh, there you go.

[David Borie]

It's time.

[Sophie Lichterman]

It's time.

[Robert Evans]

Check it out, everybody. All right, that's, that's, that's been the podcast. Don't. Don't do any of this. Don't do any of the things in this. In this episode, please. Bye.

[Danny Shapiro]

Bye.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now a available on YouTube.

[Robert Evans]

New episodes every Wednesday and Friday.

[Sophie Lichterman]

Subscribe to our channel YouTube.com behindthebastards.

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[Danny Shapiro]

Hi, I'm Radhi Devlukia and I am the host of A really Good Cry podcast.

[Robert Evans]

This week I am joined by Anna Runkle, also known as as the Crappy Childhood Fairy, a creator, teacher and guide helping people heal from the lasting emotional wounds of unsafe or chaotic childhoods. That Talking about trauma isn't always great for people. It's not always the best thing. About a third of people who are traumatized as kids feel worse when they talk about it. Get very dysregulated. Listen to A really Good cry on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.